


The Cormorant

by pallas_or_bust



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: AU: Napoleon wins, Minor Character Death, a dark story with a happy ending, mix of movie- and bookverse elements, outside continuity, the French get a Historical Villain Upgrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 13:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 54,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3979189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallas_or_bust/pseuds/pallas_or_bust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Napoleon successfully invades England and Jack and Stephen are captured, Stephen must find a way to escape and put his skills as a spy to good use, all the while coping with feelings of isolation and loss. (He gets a happy ending.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This could potentially be a long (novella-length) story encompassing several years of Stephen and Jack's lives. I already have large portions of it drafted. However, this fandom is teeny tiny (the last work posted on AO3 was three months ago!), and that makes me worry if this will have an interested audience at all. So, if you're reading and enjoying, and nobody has done so yet, PLEASE drop me a kudo or comment to signify that you're out there, and I'm not just a lone pair of hands typing into the wilderness...
> 
> Also, I'm going to be playing fast and loose with both actual-facts history and book/ movie continuity. The characters are the same, the time period is the same, but the story starts with Napoleon conquering swathes of England and Surprise reaching a made-up port somewhere in the East Indies. There's going to be ahistorical stuff and I hope that you'll be willing to roll with it :)

The _Surpise_ staggered into Kinakuta, timbers gasping and ropes groaning with the weight of their jury-rigged mast. The ship's condition, disgraceful; the crew's, scarce to be thought of; and yet Jack felt a cold premonition as they wallowed into the much-necessary port, like the shadow of an albatross passing overhead.

The port was in as shabby a state as he has ever seen, and even the sole other Royal Navy ship, the _Antares_ , had lines strewn across her deck. Never mind that _Surprise_ was in even worse shape; _Surprise_ had a whole slew of excellent excuses: the depredations of the Cape admiral, a fever, a typhoon, the disgraceful useless dockyards of Sydney, and at last, a three-day gale that had threatened to send them to the bottom. It had been touch-and-go for the last forty-eight hours of blow, and only when the waves had settled to little more than man-high, and the spray had at last begun to abate, had Jack allowed himself to limp down into his cabin—he had bruised his leg down to the bone when a monstrous wave had slammed him into the wheel—and sleep. But a ship in harbor had no such justification for her state of disarray, and Jack wondered at it. There should have been men swarming over the deck and on the dock, loading and offloading; at the very least, they should be someone keeping watch. Perhaps—perhaps that was the cause of his foreboding. Not anything out of sorts or (he grew warm with embarrassment just thinking the word) supernatural about it: just a perfectly usual twinge of dismay upon seeing the other ship looking so forlorn.

No hail of greeting came from the docks as _Surprise_ put in, and Jack glanced at Stephen, who had come out on deck. He did not need to say the word "plague,” for he and the doctor had shared enough scrapes by now that Stephen could read the question in the subtle furrow of his brow.

"No," the doctor said, "it is not the plague. There are villagers all along the shores gathering bladderwrack completely unperturbed, and I believe I see a marketplace rigged in front of the mosque. And there are Europeans in that dingy with a fair-sized haul of fish. They would not be out were there plague.” (The alleged dinghy the doctor had pointed out did indeed have what appeared to be British sailors aboard; it was not a dinghy, but a dory.)

The _Surprise_ anchored with all haste she was capable of, the men being eager to make shore. They did not seem to share Jack's unease; quite the contrary. He watched them disperse with a pang, and inwardly denounced himself at indulging such ridiculous and unfounded emotions. For God's sake, _Surprise_ had taken such an unremitting series of disasters, they deserved a little better luck now.

***

The uneasy feeling had quite left him by the time he and Stephen arrived at the one decent inn in the entire town. The cheering influence of the very good local alcoholic beverage, the sweet breeze off the sea, the taste and the smell of fresh fruit and flowers, the prospect of reprovisioning and remasting and setting out once again, and (were he honest with himself) the rebound from his previous low—all these served to put Jack in tearing high spirits. His good mood was infectious even to Stephen, who usually had no time for such things, especially not after the dreadful business with Diana. The drink was strong enough, and Stephen unprepared enough for its strength, to bring flush across cheekbones visible even against his deeply tanned skin. The doctor had already investigated a good number of the flora and fauna of Kinakuta on a previous visit, and had judged the ground very thoroughly picked-over in Burliegh's excellent monograph of ‘98, but he was willing to admit that a longer stay would doubtless yield something of interest.

A knot of sailors huddled at the next table over, and presently the very quietness and grimness with which their conversation was being carried out attracted Jack's attention. He found himself listening to Stephen expound upon the cycads with only half an ear, the other three-quarter-ear in his possession trained on the hushed words that were even now being exchanged six feet to his left.

"--nothing they could do--"

"--damnable quick maneuvering, damnable quick--"

"--still, simply disgraceful..."

"--completely unprepared--"

"--but I never would have thought..."

"No, nor I."

The men fell into a deep silence. Blushing, Jack realized that Stephen had also gone quiet some moments before, and that he had been expected to answer him and lost his chance. The doctor was now just as engaged in eavesdropping as Jack.

As one, the men at the table seemed to decide that it was time for alcohol. They raised their glasses.

"To home," one of them said, his voice nearly breaking.

"To home," they all said, in the tones that Jack was more accustomed to hearing in the "Amens" at sea-burials.

Stephen dropped his head low and whispered, "Did they lose their ship?"

Jack gave a grim movement of his head to indicate a possible affirmative. It was very possible they had been sunk or burned and then rescued by that disgrace, the _Antares_. If the rescuing ship did not have room for provisions for a long ocean crossing, they could conceivably be caught on this backwater little island for a very long time. But, it occurred to him, in that case, he had excellent news for these men, for Jack was dreadfully shorthanded after the admiral at the Cape had plundered away half his men.

"Excuse me," he said, walking up to their table with a broad grin on his face, "I could not help but hear your toast. Gentlemen, if you have need to return to England, and you have able seamen among you, then I can offer you places aboard my own ship, for we have orders to return to Portsmouth straightaway."

The men looked at him with blank astonishment and, it seemed, not an inconsiderable amount of distaste. Then one of them got a look of dawning comprehension. Glancing over his friends, he said, "Sir—have you not heard...?"

"Have I not heard what?" Jack said, growing a trifle impatient. "We have not been in a port for several weeks and so I am not familiar with the more recent news. Please enlighten me, what was the name of your vessel, which was lost?"

The men looked at one another, and their faces had gone so dark that Jack's heart gave a little start just to see them. No good news had ever come from a mouth set so grim; no good news, from a man who looked as though he did not wish to speak the words he must, for fear that doing so might make them truer.

"England," one of them said at last. "England."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear readers,  
> You exist! <3  
> Thanks to all who commented, kudo-ed, or generally made me aware you're out there.

_Surprise_ ’s repairs were underway doublequick, but necessarily hampered by the dearth of supply and sudden insolvency of the pound sterling in Kinakuta. Two days after they arrived a packet-ship winged in with urgent messages: a letter from Sophie, sealed orders. Jack opened his orders first and read them aloud to Stephen. No surrender had yet been offered. Britain’s resistance would continue, and her overseas possessions were expected to aid materially in that effort. Jack was to report to Bombay, but miss no opportunity to harass, burn, destroy, &c. &c. any and all French shipping he encountered along the way. He was to be advised that there was a considerable French fleet, commanded by Villeneuve, in the area, and to consider any minor pillaging in Kinakuta necessary for the war effort to be permitted, as a strictly emergency measure.

“They came upon us two nights ago,” the packet-ship’s captain, a man by the name of Charles Hartshorn, confided. “We barely escaped. And it is very likely they know _Surprise_ is here; when London was lost many Admiralty papers were taken.”

“We are in the midst of repairs that cannot be finished overnight,” Jack said, looking over the _Surprise_ doubtfully, refusing to absorb the full meaning of the statement— _London lost_. They had fully cleared the wreckage of the foremast, but they did not yet have the timber for a new one. “They know we have orders to touch at Kinakuta, you think?”

“Almost certainly,” said Hartshorn. “We are leaving for Sydney on the next tide; our only hope is to stay ahead of them. We cannot allow Australia to be taken by surprise.”

Jack nodded. “Then I shall endeavour to not be in Kinakuta for very much longer. There is a beach on the south side of Ambon, in the Moluccas, that I think may serve for the remainder of our refitting and provisioning.”

He retreated to the sanctuary of his cabin for Sophie’s letter. It was even more painful than the orders, containing as it did a more detailed account of the shattering blow so unexpectedly dealt. London had fallen in the first week, along with most of the southeast. The royal family had fled to Edinburgh.

Sophie and the children were still safe, at least at the time she had written (two months ago, now). Hard rains had been falling for the past week, she wrote, and Napoleon’s army had become hopelessly bogged down. Evidently he had not remembered to take into account Britain’s soggy summers, she noted smugly. She hoped that they might rain him back to France. But implied in those cheerful words was the opposite scenario: if the sun came out… if the weather held… Evidently Sophie did not know how many men were on each side, but even if the British Army outnumbered Napoleon’s, the fact remained that he was a spectacular general, and had several spectacular generals serving under him. Britain’s leadership, well. Save young Arthur Wellesley, who (it was said) might make something of himself one day...

Sophie did not say it outright, but if she were captured her very life would depend upon Jack’s meek acquiescence to France. If Bonaparte could take the whole of Britain, he would effectively gain whole families of hostages for every man in the Royal Navy. Sophie’s hand had shaken as she wrote the letters out.

Stephen laid a steadying hand on Jack’s arm, and Jack realized tears were streaming down his face. He sat abruptly and heaved in a huge gulp of air, like a man in danger of drowning.

“Hush, brother,” murmured Stephen close at his ear. “All will be well.”

“How can you say that?” Jack croaked. God, sometimes he wished he could have a little more of Stephen’s cold logic, a little less of this emotion so hot in his stomach he felt sick.

“This is not the first country I have lost,” Stephen said, with a quirk of his lips so faint Jack could scarce see it through his misty veil of tears. “And if my new country is to be Napoleon’s, well then, God willing it will not be the last. Come, now, we must away. There is not a moment to be lost.”

***

If they could only get to Bombay there might be hope: that was what Jack kept repeating to himself, as he watched the last of the men straggle aboard, their pockets full of ten-inch nails, jackets bulging over clucking chickens, carrying fifty-pound sacks of flour between them. Though the majority of the Antareses preferred to try their luck in Kinakuta, the _Surprise_ had gained a lieutenant, a midshipman, a spare purser, and six able seamen. As for the other ship’s ill-fated captain, he had gone mad and been confined to the brig some six weeks before their arrival in Kinakuta, and their first lieutenant had died in agony after an encounter with the Maori and their barbed spears. Still, Jack was pleased with his spoils, both the men and the supplies.

Stephen for his part had procured a crate of limes and had an ink bottle, a sheaf of blotting paper, salts of mercury, powdered Peruvian bark, and three dead lizards secreted in various places about his person, not mentioning the usual pistol in his boot and two gold coins sewed into the drawstring-hole of his smallclothes. He set down the limes as Bonden came aboard: the man was carrying great coils of rope, precious supplies indeed, for the _Surprise_ ’s splices had splices at this point.

“Sailcloth,” Jack was muttering, “did anyone think to grab sailcloth?” He had personally overseen the rapid felling and loading of a great tree that would serve as a foremast, and the critical question of sails had escaped him until that moment.

“The larboard gun crews saw to it, sir,” Pullings said in his ear, and Jack brightened at once.

“Very well, then,” the captain said, and they only just made the tide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should have mentioned last chapter-- the word 'Kinakuta' has been borrowed from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to all who have commented and left kudos! I haven't kept up with replying to comments very well--real life has been extraordinarily busy these last couple weeks (in a good way!). But rest assured that the story is still here and I am still here :)

The _Surprise_ put in on a sandy beach on Ambon, one they had charted themselves on Jack’s very first voyage in command of her. So severe had been her mauling in the storm that they made a pitiful seven knots on the way there, even with the wind and current in their favor. Still, the hull was intact, which was what really mattered, and on the beach and in the jungle they might cautiously forage for food (fresh fruit, always fresh fruit, Stephen encouraged, although the men also brought in great hauls of birds’ eggs, turtles, and, in one triumphant case, a wild pig almost the size of a man) and additional supply (hardwood and more water, at first, although soon one of the men had the bright idea to dive for pearls now that their money was barely worth the paper it was printed on, and they hauled in enough for a lady’s necklace by the time the week had passed).

Stephen himself spent a most productive week observing the birds of paradise, his sad, dead lizards quite forgotten. Jack would not permit him or any of the men to sleep ashore, for the pounding of the drums, which in turn left the captain a captive audience for Stephen’s rhapsodizing. “You should see them, Jack,” he said, the fourth night they were there. “I do believe I have finally found a species whose mating habits are more ridiculous than our own.” And he launched into a description, as finely detailed as the report he intended to write up, and accompanied by gestures and even hastily-drawn diagrams.

“By God, Stephen,” Jack said, a smile coming to his face, “One might almost think you were trying to catch one of their females yourself.”

“Oh, I should certainly like to,” Stephen said, “but they are crafty ones. None have wandered into my nets thus far. Well, a male, once, but he bounced out. I had strung it too tightly. In any case, I do not know to whom I would present them, when we return—that is, if we return, to where…” He trailed off, and the two of them lapsed into a miserable silence, for Jack’s burden of captainship was falling on him heavily.

Jack was jolted out of his brown study by the sound of a cello being tuned. It was dreadfully off, having been knocked about a good deal in the storm, with its wood bloated in the tropical air; it sounded almost nasal.

“I have no D string,” Stephen said, “unless you care to sacrifice the ship’s cat. So, you will have to be content with the G, and some very odd fingering.”

“That will do quite nicely,” said Jack, a wave of relief coming over him. “We have not duetted in—Lord, how long has it been?”

“Three weeks, I should think,” Stephen said, tuning complete. “The men took my end-pin after the storm and melted it down for nails. Said it was the only piece of metal on the ship not being used to hold plank together.”

“I am quite sorry to hear that. I am sure we can jury-rig a replacement for you now that we have a surplus.”

Stephen waved him away. “It is already done. One of them whittled me a new one from wood. I cannot say the hold on the floor is as good, but it is beautifully carved.”

“Just so. What shall we play?”

“The Boccherini?”

“Oh, it has been a while. Let me see if I remember how it goes…” And Jack launched into the first movement flawlessly.

***

The splicing was nearly complete, the sails restitched and in some cases replaced, the great tree trimmed and sanded and set up straight; but one morning the sun, burning off the fog of morning, revealed the first French sails, heart-stoppingly close. Jack whipped out his spyglass, but it was hardly necessary: as the fog vanished with great rapidity, there was revealed not only one ship, but two, three, four, five French men-of-war. The _Surprise_ was soon in a frenzy of activity, with Jack pacing the deck. He wore a thunderous expression rather than his usual look of bottled intensity, and Stephen, on his way down to the orlop, wondered at the heaviness of his tread on the boards above, so unlike the sharp, precise footwork he had grown accustomed to over many years and many battles together.

A great splintering—a searing pain—Stephen came back to himself with his nose to the planking, Padeen hovering over him. Words, soft and rushed, that he did not understand: his ears were ringing abominably. Padeen gently turned him over, then applied firm pressure to his neck, which Stephen vaguely registered felt wet and slick. Stephen held himself still, feeling his own pulse pounding against Padeen’s hands. Neither carotid nor jugular had been hit: this was plain from the simple fact that several seconds had passed and he had not lost consciousness yet. The wound likely looked worse than it was; indeed, Padeen seemed dreadfully shaken, and fat tears were spilling from his eyes even as his hands held steady.

“You are doing wonderfully,” Stephen said, in Irish, his voice a hoarse croak, for it was not possible for Padeen to keep all the pressure off his throat and still stanch the bleeding. “Do not vex yourself, I am quite well.”

A moment later someone—from his position on the ground Stephen could not see who—stuck his head in the door and leaped back with a cry of dismay.

“No—“ Stephen shouted after them: he was not dead, he could see a patient if they just gave him a moment; were there any casualties? But the man was gone.

In another moment Jack came thundering down the stairs, face deathly white. “Stephen—I heard—“

“You heard wrong, Jack, I am well,” Stephen whispered, as Jack came in to stand over him. Seeming to sense his discomfort at being so loomed over, Jack crouched down, face creasing with dismay and wonder.

“But Stephen, your throat is cut!”

“Not cut as such, just scratched a little as I was knocked to the ground. All the vital parts are in order. But I could have sworn that we were in a battle, Jack. Is it not your role to command the men?”

Jack shook his head, doing a poor job of concealing the deep emotion he felt. “Five ships all told, two of them seventy-fours, come up in the fog before dawn, and now they have the weather gauge. They have caught us very prettily, and it was only a question of whether they killed us all before they took the ship. We have struck our colors and only wait to be boarded.”

“But Jack, how? Even we did not know where we were going until we left Kinakuta!”

“Well, that is a pretty question indeed,” Jack said, though Stephen instantly recognized that he had his suspicions. Ah, yes, the packet-ship’s captain. What had been his name? Hartshorn, Charlies Hartshorn, that was it. Had the packet been captured? Had Hartshorn given them up?

“If we have struck our colors, then why…?”

“I imagine that was meant to be the warning shot,” Jack said humorlessly. "It came before we struck."

“Was anyone else hurt?“

“No, Doctor, you are the only casualty. Damned unlucky business.”

“Well, I never claimed to be the lucky one, between the two of us. That is your prerogative.”

Jack sighed deeply, giving Stephen’s had a squeeze. From above, the sound of men hailing one another; one of the enemy ships was drawing close. “I know.”

He took a moment to compose himself, straightening his clothing and retying his hair. Then, nodding at Stephen, he went above to be relieved of his sword.


	4. Chapter 4

A wound to the neck was a damned ticklish business at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. Stephen quickly doused it with alcohol to numb the pain—not that this was terribly effective, since he did not believe in his own placebo nearly as much as the men did—and decided that when the surrender was over with he would demonstrate the stitching technique that was best for thin, delicate skin to Padeen, performing the operation himself using the miraculously unsmashed shaving mirror from his own supplies.

     The French commodore did not return Jack’s sword to him. Jack was not supposed to be irked by this—could not, in truth, justifiably be irked by it, for while no sane man would have fought, in Jack’s position, nevertheless the return of the sword of a captured captain was a compliment paid only to those who fought, and Jack could not really be said to have fought. The French commodore was polite, even clinical when accepting the surrender. Jack had not met him before, but he judged him to be a tight operator and a strict disciplinarian. Not a particularly daring man, perhaps, but one did not need daring men when one possessed five ships to the enemy’s one, with guns of collectively ten times the weight and about twice the range, and the weather gauge on top of those. Indeed, one merely needed to have a pulse in order to take the enemy in, and this was why Jack was also uncommon cool in the necessary ceremony of the transfer of the sword; his enemy had not shown any particular dash or skill.

     The French commodore gave his orders: the men were to be taken prisoner and scattered throughout the fleet, some score to each ship, with Aubrey and the officers on the flagship, the seventy-four gun _Hieroglyphe_. And Stephen Maturin was to be found at once and held separately from the rest of the men.

     “What?” asked Jack, speaking quite out of turn. “Why the doctor separate from the rest of us?”

     The commodore drew his arms behind his back. “Those are my orders. I will put him aboard the _Fantastique_ ; she is a most snug little sloop. You need not worry on his behalf, captain,” he added, for Jack has gone quite pale.

     It was obvious enough now that the commodore knew Maturin was wanted by the French intelligence services, and that he knew or guessed that Jack knew. Jack did not wish to nettle the commodore by openly mistrusting the implication that Stephen would remain unharmed, but nevertheless he held an accurately high estimation of his friend’s worth to the British intelligence service, and therefore to the French intelligence service, and knew that the commodore might prove rather wittingly or unwittingly a lair. But he could not come out and call him so, and so he hedged, “That rather unfortunate shot straight through us did not a little damage. The doctor was wounded.”

     Jack was no great observer of men under most occasions; he was about as shrewd as a daisy, and as trusting as a newly whelped puppy. But he was not blind, and the French commodore was no great deceiver. His face took on a look of grave alarm. “You mean to say—that is, I am very sorry to hear that. Do you have any idea of the severity of the wound?”

     “He took a splinter to the neck,” said Jack, and though he was no deceiver himself his natural worry for his friend showed through, and the pallor he had shown racing down the ladder to what he expected to be the corpse of his dearest friend in the world returned to his face. “He may yet pull through, it is thought, but he will need a good deal of looking after. I do not think he should be moved, and certainly without due care you will lose him for… for whatever purpose you have for him, which I cannot possibly understand, unless you are in need of a crack physician."

      None of the men had heard the good news about Doctor Maturin’s condition; worse, they had all heard Padeen’s anguished wail, which carried throughout the ship, and then seen Goldilocks pale as pale racing down to the orlop to see him, and then straightaway come back up with a face like a thundercloud to formally surrender the ship. Though they were all standing stock still as at a muster under the threat of the French guns, Jack felt a current of strong emotion go through the crew, who loved Stephen as one of their own while at the same time understanding that he was a being of a wholly different kind than they were; half again as clumsy, for instance, and helpless as a newborn regarding anything remotely related to life at sea, and altogether too fond of pickling dead things in perfectly good spirits, but above all able to saw through a femur in twenty-eight seconds, if the situation called for it, and fluent in Latin and Greek, and kind in his own distracted way. Jack was not able to look about himself with any great freedom, but he heard a few great sniffles.

     “I cannot grant him any attendants from the _Surprise_ ,” the commodore said slowly, and it was remarkable how, through the fellowship of Navy-men everywhere, no matter what their national origin, Jack was able to discern the sentiment, _and I am damned sorry for it, too, but orders are orders, and I am not willing to be court-martialed for this_. “Nevertheless, the _Fantastique_ has a very good surgeon, and I will send my own flagship’s physician if need be.”

     Jack had no doubt this last sentence was meant in kindness, and perhaps the commodore truly had no knowledge of what his nation’s intelligence service would do to Maturin were he delivered to them alive. Then again, maybe he did have an inkling, for after a pause he turned to Jack with a furrowed brow and said, “Your men… they love Doctor Maturin very much, do they?”

     “We all do,” Jack said, and was surprised when the words came out more like the growl of a beast than human speech.

     “Well, then,” the commodore said. He seemed on the verge of laying a reassuring hand on Jack’s arm, but backed down at the last moment, seeing the man’s face. “Well. We are sorry.”

***

Killick had precious little time to sneak into the surgery and inform Stephen that Jack had told the commodore that their doctor was near death, and so Stephen had better act like it. Stephen fell into a convincing swoon onto the cot, having thankfully not had the time to change from his bloodstained shirt, while Padeen had the presence of mind to cast a cloth over their ready surgical equipment, kneel down next to him and clap a bloody rag to his throat. Since it was the very same bloody rag that had been applied earlier, to actual medical effect, this was not so great a dissemblance, and it meant that Stephen, eyes fluttering, to all observers barely conscious and speaking delirious nonsense, was able to instruct Padeen in Irish as to which of his personal papers it was most vital be destroyed immediately.

     When at last the simulated bleeding ceased, Stephen was carried out on a sailcloth stretcher between two of the _Fantastique_ ’s men, and lowered onto her deck with great care; nevertheless, the Surprises gasped to a man at every shiver the stretcher made, and one of them even let out an indignant cry of, “Handsomely, now!” when the left of the stretcher was allowed to ride an inch higher than the right; it took all of Stephen’s considerable self-discipline not to sit up the waist and give them a wave, just to let the men know he was quite well.

     Their concern touched him, as it always did. He had never looked to become the beloved pet of sixscore hardened fighting men, and now at the thought of being torn from them forever, he felt a curious catch of emotion in his throat. For he knew heart and soul that this was the end of an era, both in his life and in the history of the world, an event every bit as momentous if not more so than Lord Fitzgerald’s betrayal, and he hated to see the old world go. In particular, he would have liked to have said something better to Jack, something to mark the years of their friendship, to put a period at the end of their acquaintance. But the thought that such a friendship, so deep and so constant, for so many years of his life, could end was like a dagger in his heart. Perhaps he had thought that only death would part them—perhaps he had not really believed even that.

     He felt the gentle thunk of the stretcher onto the deck of the _Fantastique_ , and risked opening his eyes to catch one last glance at his friend. There he was, face full of concern, staring down at him from _Surprise_ ’s quarterdeck. As Stephen watched, his figure began to recede; the two ships were pulling away from one another, smooth yet rapid. There was Jack Aubrey: a small figure now, and growing ever smaller.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello dear readers! Another chapter for you all. Alas, there is no Jack here, and the story is going to follow Stephen for a while, but rest assured that he is alive and well.

The _Fantastique_ was a small sloop, neither terribly fast nor terribly slow. Stephen spent almost a week under the care of her surgeon, and they had a very profitable exchange on the subject of the various gaol-fever remedies they had tried and inevitably seen fail. Though the man was an amiable companion his political sympathies lay entirely with Napoleon, and he was not so self-indulgent as to maintain Stephen in the sickbay, solely for the sake of his companionship; and in any case there was no denying the wound was healing quite well. Still, one could not have called Jack’s stratagem entirely useless; it would have been worth it for the chance to burn his papers alone, and now he had also gained a friend on the _Fantastique,_ one who might be applied to for, if not escape, at least a little leverage.

When the surgeon decided he could no longer decently pretend that there was any reason for Stephen to be under his care, Stephen was passed off to the captain for dinner. The man gave Stephen a civil reception, certainly nothing to be complained of; he was something of an enthusiast for parrots, had Stephen perhaps seen his monograph…? Conversation flowed freely, and Stephen gathered that the French fleet was still in the Indian Ocean with the goal of playing merry hell with Indiamen returning with the Canton trade. Three ships of their squadron had diverted for refitting; they had been caught in the same gale that had so incommoded the _Surprise_. The _Fantastique_ and the _Hieroglyphe_ had instead rendezvoused with several more ships under the command of none other than Christy-Palliere. Stephen kept a carefully neutral expression as he digested this knowledge and his dinner; Christy-Palliere was as sympathetic an opponent as could be hoped for, and his own surgeon a good deal more than that. If only he could find some way to get word to theflagship…

The captain’s own personal Killick handed Stephen a fresh-brewed cup of coffee—Nirvana, he had not seen fresh coffee in weeks—and after dinner was done, he locked him in the brig with the words, “The captain’s apologies—you are not to be out unattended—orders, you understand.”

Stephen understood. His treatment had so far been more civil than he had ever dreamed; in fact, if he had the brig to himself, as it seemed he did, he would doubtless be traveling in far greater luxury than Jack or any of the others, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the bowels of the _Hieroglyph_. Solitary confinement was a trial in and of itself, but one that Stephen was perhaps uniquely suited for. If they could be persuaded to give him paper, he had a good many notes crammed into his head he would be glad to have out. Perhaps he could work up that cormorant manuscript he had been meaning to get to these last several months, which had always seemed to be pushed out of the way in favor of more urgent activities…

After only about a quarter of an hour, in walked a man a few inches taller than Stephen, but with a peculiar stoop that nearly negated his advantage; he still had all his teeth, which was something remarkable in a seaman, but was proportionately impoverished in hair. Most of him seemed thin, except the traditional beer gut. The door shrieked as he closed it, the sound of un-oiled metal. So this small corner of the brig could not have had much use, in recent years.

“I apologize,” the man said in French, grinning sheepishly, holding up an apparatus that shone dully in the diffuse light of the corridor “but I must insist.”

Stephen blinked at it, slow to comprehend. At last he recognized the apparatus: chain shackles.

What was the man still staring at him for? Oh, yes. He held out his hands obediently. “Clap away, sir.” It was no use being surly with a man who was only doing his job, and if the fellow was to be his gaoler and guard, then all the better to get started on good terms; else, they would have a long voyage indeed.

The shackles consisted of two iron chains threaded through an unyielding iron ovoid one shoulderswidth long. Stephen held his left wrist up as his gaoler positioned one pair of chains such that one length passed on each side of the wrist, then padlocked the ends together, trapping his wrist to the ovoid. The key went in his pocket; Stephen made note of which. Of course it would not do to escape now—not when his face was so fresh in the mind of every man abovedeck. Yet it was always good to have such information.

For a moment, Stephen was left with the shackle dangling its free chain from his left wrist, and then his right wrist was padlocked in as well. Though Stephen could not get a clear look at the man’s hands in the half-light, he noticed that their palms had an unusual texture: bumpy, but not rough with calluses. The guard nodded with satisfaction as Stephen flexed his wrists. The chain did not slip over them; they had been fastened tight.

“Am I to wear these for the duration of our voyage?”

“Oh, no, monsieur. We are coming into port.”

“And the brig, is that only in port as well?”

A shrug. “The captain has some kind of special instructions about you. Say you’re to be confined to the brig at all times.”

Stephen had guessed as much; the brig’s usual state of disuse, and his current occupancy of it, together indicated that the ship’s captain was not in the habit of keeping prisoners here, yet some interfering force had deigned this just the kind of out-of-the-way corner where a spy could get up to very little mischief.

At his silence the man grimaced, looking guiltily around the room, which was windowless, as long as a man was tall and as deep as a man was wide. If it had lacked a few feet in height, and had a wall instead of iron bars in front, it could have been a coffin.

“I am grateful to you, sir,” Stephen said, after a while.

“Why, whatever for?”

“For the continuance of my circulation. If you had cut it off, I fear gas gangrene would have been a real possibility by the time we arrive in France.” He paused for a moment, watching his gaoler out of the corner of one eye. “It is a miserable affliction, gas gangrene. I have seen it more times than I care to count. Although I must say, for ailments of the seaman, the advanced stages of the great pox give it a fair run for its money. I have reattached a great many ears in my time, sometimes the same ear on multiple occasions. But never have I managed to reattach a nose, in one afflicted by great pox. It does not simply fall off; rather, it is eaten away.”

The gaoler gulped. Ah, so he had been correct in his guess: the bumps on the man’s palms were a common symptom one to two months after infection.

“I must urge you, most strongly, that if any of your friends begin to present the classic signs—doubtless I need not go into detail—that you direct them to your ship’s physician at once. A common barber-surgeon has no notion of how to properly treat the disease.” Indeed, Stephen had compared notes on the great pox with the ship’s surgeon and found some of his ideas astonishing. The man actually believed that patients benefitted from malaria. Malaria!

The guard rubbed at his collar, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Interesting…” he muttered.

Stephen interrupted him with a jaw-cracking yawn. “Well, you have been most kind, but I fear I am dead on my feet, if you’ll excuse the expression. If you would be so kind as to hang a hammock…” He held up his bound hands as evidence for his incapacity.

The guard seemed on the verge of speaking throughout his work, but Stephen made a great show of weariness. The hammock was hung in a trice, and Stephen managed to fall into it without subsequently falling out: a substantial feat, without his hands to help balance him.

Then, without a word, the guard hung his own hammock below Stephen’s. “Seem’s we’re bunkmates now,” he said, again with that note of apology Stephen had noticed earlier.

“Good Lord,” Stephen said faintly. “Do they not need you on watch? For the—for the bits with the sails?” In French he had not had as thorough a naval education as in English, and his lubberliness began to show once more.

“I imagine they do, doctor. But orders is orders.”

After a moment, soft snores from his new bunkmate mingled with the other sounds of the ship. Stephen had intended to stay awake—to assess his options, set snares, set more plans in motion. But the rocking of the ship lulled him, and his fatigue had gathered strength rapidly over the last half-hour. He drifted away from consciousness like a ship without an anchor.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Jack chapter!  
> Warning: stuff's gonna blow up, people are gonna die, and it's not gonna be pretty. This fic will have a happy ending but it didn't have a happy beginning and this is the start of a pretty rocky middle.

“Think nothing of it, think nothing of it,” smiled Christy-Palliere—now an admiral—when Jack attempted to thank him for the magnificent spread of food now on the table before them. “You have been treated most shamefully, I am afraid. I must beg your forgiveness.”

Behind him, wreathed in darkness and warped by the glass of the _Hieroglyphe_ ’s stern windows, was the port they had come into earlier that day. The shoreline was growing dark and obscured by fogs—could have been in any of a dozen small ports in the formerly-Dutch East Indies. It was far too late for a typical naval dinner, and in any case the admiral and Jack were quite alone save for the single steward; not even the _Hieroglyphe_ ’s captain was there, unceremoniously ejected from his own cabin in what Jack could only interpret as a stinging rebuke from Christy-Palliere for what had occurred on his watch.

Jack could not help but privately agree with his host that the conduct of some officers under his command had been barely short of unforgivable, but he was not inclined to admit so aloud; instead he merely said, “Well, it is good to stretch out and drink again, and I thank you for your most handsome apology. I trust now that we are in your care nothing of the sort will happen again.” He and the rest of the officers of the _Surprise_ had been confined to the lowermost portions of the _Hieroglyphe_ along with the enlisted men for nine stifling, nearly airless days, their water ration a quarter of what it should have been. Learning that the reason was a leak in the water casks did precious little to cool his silent fury; it had been the responsibility of the French to ensure the welfare of their prisoners, and three men had died. Jack himself still felt parched and dizzy, and did not hesitate a moment to sit when Christy-Palliere hurriedly motioned his steward to come forward with a chair.

“Indeed, I am utterly ashamed that it happened in the first place, and I can only assure you that you and your men will not continue to suffer.” said Christy-Palliere. “Conditions will be much improved aboard the _Marechal_. I would say that three-quarters of your complement were transferred today, and the other quarter will not suffer unduly from one more night aboard the _Hieroglyphe_ now that we are in port with water to spare. Again, my utmost apologies.”

He poured wine—a truly spectacular vintage—and began to eat. Jack followed his lead, although his hands shook slightly; he had given his share of ship’s biscuit to Babbington, who had taken desperately ill in the heat, and had not eaten in two days. Christy-Palliere did not comment, but his grim face was more eloquent than words, and Jack feared for the captain of the _Hieroglyphe_ the next time he reported to his admiral.

Christy-Palliere sighed. “A feeling has plagued me of late, _capitaine_. I do not know how to describe it, but an intuition tells me that perhaps you will understand. All I can say is that I feel a mismatch between my surroundings and myself. Or perhaps it would be better say, between the men surrounding me and myself. There is a kind of hunger in them that cannot be satisfied, and I am afraid I can never understand it. We are all men of our eras, it is said, and I am privately afraid that our era has already slipped away from the world.”

Jack did not quite know how to reply, although he knew perfectly well what Stephen would have said—would have launched into an eloquent tirade on the subject of power and avarice unfettered, on Napoleon, that supreme arsonist of history. He only said, “Sir—I must also press the point that the officers and I have all offered parole, but that it has not been accepted, and the continued confinement of the sailors below deck is cruel and against all common practice. Is there no prison on land that can take them in? Furthermore, our surgeon was separated from the entire rest of the ship’s company. I believe you have had the pleasure of meet—”

The sounds of a commotion on deck; men shouting hoarsely, scraping, cursing in French that morphed into a long and passionate harangue. Christy-Palliere, who had been listening attentively, now turned with a look of utmost annoyance and said, “Excuse me, I must see what the matter is. My flag captain is ill, and I say to you privately that I would not trust the first lieutenant to float a cork in a bathtub.”

Jack followed Christy-Palliere on deck, hoping to gain a glance at the shore or the _Fantastique_ in the commotion. It was now full dark, yet he thought he saw the outline of cliffs off to the west. From the deck of the _Hieroglyphe_ , situated at the end of a long pier, he could easily observe the _Marechal_ , a seventy-four and Christy-Palliere’s flagship. A small sloop, likely the _Fantastique_ , had anchored in the bay which the western cliffs neatly hemmed in. He stared at it, but of course it was absurd to think he might observe some sign of Stephen from this distance. Even if he had a glass at hand, Stephen was undoubtedly confined belowdeck.

The source of the commotion was quickly identified: a barrel, spinning as it hung crazily a few feet above deck, was spilling a thin line of powder on the planking. Loading and unloading ship was not work that should have been done at night, and Jack could make neither head nor tail of the rapid, furious French being thrown about. Yet at last, from snatches of words and phrases, he smoked it: a man had intended to smuggle a woman aboard in an empty powder barrel; had directed her to one such barrel on the dock; had, along with his mates, attempted to get said barrel aboard the ship; had pried its planks apart only to discover that there had been some confusion, that it was actual powder inside; had, using drunken logic, decided that the now-unsound barrel was best returned to its place on the dock and been horribly confused when powder began spilling from the crack like sand from an hourglass.

It was a disgraceful display, so disgraceful that he actually chose to sidle belowdeck again rather than embarrass Christy-Palliere with the knowledge that he had witnessed it. It was for this reason that he was on the ladder and not on deck when the explosion occurred.

Even so he fell the last few feet of the ladder, kneecaps knocking painfully against wood in the process. In an instant he was scrambling back up again. A column of fire rose on deck where the powder had been, splintered pieces of wood standing up around it. The barrel hung above, staves licked by flames. Christy-Palliere lay only a few feet away; Jack lunged across the deck, seized the man, and flung him bodily down the ladderway, following a split second later. Not a moment too soon; the barrel caught and went off like a bomb, and even belowdeck Jack could feel the blistering heat and hear the cries of agony of the men above.

Christy-Palliere, in a heap upon the planking where Jack had dropped him, did not move. Jack turned him over: a stain was rapidly spreading across his side, and a long streak of blood from under his wig that turned half his face black in the half-light.

There was no time to think; in another moment the fire would burn through the deck. Jack would have preferred to carry Christy-Palliere over his shoulder, but doing so would force the wound on the man’s side bear all his weight. One arm behind the small of his back and the other under his knees, and Jack was up with Christy-Palliere in his arms.

Jack moved purposefully against the flow of men running towards the stern of the ship to fight the fire until he came to another ladder, then ascended. This put him amidships. He propped Christy-Palliere’s body against the side rail, then seized a passing midshipman by the collar and said, “Chercher le… le surgeon. Le medicin. God damn it, fetch the doctor!”

The midshipman, wide-eyed, scampered off.

Jack had not even had time to check if Christy-Palliere was still alive, and he turned to him now with this purpose only to find that, not only were the man’s eyes open, they were alert and trained upon him with something that looked almost like amusement.

“Pray do not concern yourself on my behalf,” Christy-Palliere said. He gingerly brought a hand up to his head, looking unsurprised when it came away bloody. “I believe I was more stunned than actually wounded. If you would be so kind,” he said, extending a hand up to Jack.

Jack, almost sick with relief that the only man in the French Navy who seemed to care if his prisoners lived or died had not just been blown up in a freak accident, hauled the man to his feet. But the admiral was scarcely upright before he gasped, clutching the wound on his side; the stain was growing still. Just then the midshipman reappeared, surgeon in tow, and Jack found himself helping to very cautiously lower Christy-Palliere to the deck once more.

”C’est le rate,” the surgeon said, looking grim. He said something rapidly in French, and Christy-Palliere, suddenly very pale, nodded.

“Here,” the surgeon said to Jack, pointing to the wound and pressing a cloth into his hands. “You push.”

Jack did as he was told as the surgeon disappeared, blood welling up around his hands. He pressed harder, which made Christy-Palliere suck in a rapid breath of pain. “Merely stunned, then?”

“Got my spleen, it seems,” the admiral said. “He is confident he can stop the bleeding if he can have it out, but for that we must go ashore.” He swallowed, looking clammy. “Thank you, Captain Aubrey. For…”

“There is no call to thank me,” Jack said at once. “It is as you say—we are of the same era.”

Christy-Palliere jerked his head. In a moment the boat was going over the side, the surgeon with his instruments at Jack’s shoulder, Jack’s hands still firm against Christy-Palliere’s wound. One of the sailors gave him a startled look, but none said a word. On the ship, the fire continued to burn as the dusk wind came blowing from the land. Much of the crew was engaged in fighting the flames; Jack thought they stood a good chance as long as the wind did not pick up.

They drove the boat ashore through heavy swells. The surgeon directed Christy-Palliere’s transport to a relatively flat stretch of solid ground, bringing out storm lanterns to serve as light for the surgery. Though Jack had done his best to keep the bleeding under control the motion of the boat had prevented him from keeping steady pressure on the wound at all times, and it seemed to him that Christy-Palliere was barely conscious.

Very soon the surgeon drew out his scalpel and other tools. He muttered something in Christy-Palliere’s ear, and the man gave a ghost of a smile.

“Hold him down,” the surgeon said to Jack, and then in French directed the other men to do the same. Jack positioned himself at Christy-Palliere’s shoulders. When it came time for the actual surgery he looked away; hated the thought of blade passing through flesh, the cold deliberateness of it. _At least this time it is not Stephen_ , he thought guiltily, staring fixedly at the trunk of a palm tree.

Still, it was horrible enough: though Christy-Palliere did not try to fight him, Jack could tell the instant the surgery started from the sudden stopping of his breath and the way every muscle came alive with tension. Then the breath shuddered out, was drawn raggedly back in, and Jack found himself whispering, “That’s it,” with a kind of fierce triumph.

In a moment the horrid tension had left Christy-Palliere; his breath came slow and shallow. Jack risked a look at his face and found it dead white, lit ghoulishly by the lantern, eyes visible only as rolled-back strips of sclera. He shuddered, and looked back at the _Hieroglyphe._ The fire was not yet out, and in the twilight it glowed like a mad thing. Men swarmed around it with water and sand, yet they did not seem to be making any progress. In fact, it almost seemed the fire had grown since they left the ship.

The surgeon said something, exchanging a needle and thread for his scalpel. Jack found his eyes drawn to the man despite himself. The sleeves of his coat and shirt were rolled up, his hands sunk in blood up to the wrists. He reached toward the wound—Jack’s stomach roiled—and stopped. The line of his mouth went grim. His free hand went to one of Christy-Palliere’s and held it, uselessly.

The admiral's breath left him in a sigh. He did not breathe again. Jack Aubrey knelt alongside as the ship burned and the wind freshened; as the surgeon bowed his head; as a kindred soul slipped away from the world.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We pick up with Stephen about ten minutes after we left off with Jack. In other news, this chapter ate my life.

No lanterns were provided to prisoners, and so the setting of the sun robbed the brig of what little light it had. Stephen was struggling to sleep and his guard was already snoring when the cry came down: “All hands on deck!”

Gerard came instantly awake, bundling out of his hammock in seconds. But then the man hesitated; did they really mean _all hands_ , or did they mean _all hands with the exception of the hand watching the prisoner?_ Failure to obey orders was a whipping offense… but when one set of orders directly contradicted the other, what was a man to do?

“You could shackle me to the bars,” Stephen suggested. “That way I could have nowhere to run, even if I did get the door open.”

“Right, right,” poor Gerard said, comforted by this eminently helpful suggestion, for he was the sort of man who could not direct himself in confusing or chaotic situations, and, when confronted with such situations, followed the first order or indeed piece of friendly advice that came his way. Of course, the move accomplished nothing materially, Stephen being trapped in the brig whether he was shackled with both wrists together, or with one wrist to the bars. But it _did_ force the guard into close enough proximity to Stephen that the doctor was able to pick his pocket of one of the shackle keys. Then the man waddled off at top speed down the corridor, leaving Stephen alone.

Stephen hooked the edge of the metal bar of his shackles underneath the head of a nail in the planking over his head. It took several tries, but eventually he was able to pry it loose enough to draw out with his free hand. Almost five inches long, black pig-iron, it ended in a wicked splinter of a spike.

He had, over the course of his imprisonment, spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at the lock on the door. The locking mechanism had been entirely covered in a thin sheet of brass, as had the door surrounding the keyhole. He could not reach through the bars to the keyhole with his fingers even after he freed himself from the awkward encumbrance of his shackles, but the nail extended his reach. He held it at the very end of his fingertips, praying that a sudden noise or surprise would not cause him to drop it. After only about five minutes of sweating and cursing in Catalan under his breath, he was free. Free from his cell, not the ship, but that was a start.

After so long at sea, he had a good idea of the general plan of ships, and he knew that now, in the dark and the chaos, and in port, would very likely be best chance of escaping he was ever going to get. He gripped the nail loosely in his right hand and slipped out of the brig.

Farther down the corridor he could see men running up and down the ladder with great haste, nearly colliding every other instant. He had only rarely seen ships in such disarray; it was seldom a good sign. He slipped up onto deck immediately after a very large man whose bulk conveniently hid his face from the view of the quarterdeck, then set about looking as busy and sailorlike as possible while he determined just what was going on, thanking heaven that they had clad him in leftover sailor’s slops.

A great blaze was lighting up the dockyard, consuming both the docks themselves and at least one ship, threatening to catch even the higher foliage of some of the palm trees closest to the water. Stephen squinted at the burning ship with a dart of alarm; his last intelligence had the Surprises all aboard the _Hieroglyphe,_ one of the seventy-fours, but in the dim light, with the great bonfire behind, he could not read the names of the ships at the docks. There were two seventy-fours and the thirty-two, along with a good many other smaller boats. Silhouettes danced frantically in front of the flames, some forming into a cursory bucket brigade, some trying to untie the ships and set them free before the docks’ flames spread that far, some stealing and looting with impunity, still others apparently milling about in panic, with little aim and little accomplished but to get in the way of the activities of the more clear-headed.

This was not to say the _Fantastique_ was out of danger in the more open waters of the harbor; in fact, she was in immediate danger of catching fire. The currents and tide, together with the harbor’s treacherous sandbars, conspired against the _Fantastique_ ’s attempts to sail clear of the embers that came flying at her from the docks. The wind blew straight from shore, but it was impossible to spread sail, for embers threatened to catch even the hanging ropes alight. In the general confusion, Stephen thought he heard orders for boats to be lowered, but even that seemed to be proceeding slowly and chaotically.

In the dark a man almost tripped over him and ran on, cursing him for a lubber, not even bothering to check his face. A lucky escape, but Stephen could not afford to continue staring about. He stood, wondering if he might slip aboard one of the ship’s smaller boats without being detected, and thereby make his escape. But no sooner had he formed this vague plan than the deck below him gave a great lurch, and a hideous grinding noise filled his ears as it seemed the whole ship trembled. He recognized the sensation, had indeed felt it before, upon the _Polychrest_ ; they had run aground.

And now most certainly his plan with the boat would fail, for the captain had no choice now but to attempt to tow the _Fantastique_ off the sandbar, and far too much scrutiny would fall upon the men doing it. It would be a tedious and embarrassing business under normal circumstances, for it showed a remarkable lack of seamanship, to run a ship aground in a charted harbor, but given their situation, with fire reaching down out of the very wind to assault them, it became not only understandable, given that the hands had been two-thirds engaged with perennially dousing fires, and much scorched besides, but indeed dangerous and heroic work, for the boats would be just as imperiled as the ship, and the fire watch would have to be exceeding vigilant if they did not wish to burn to the waterline.

Stephen was sympathetic to the plight of the men around him, but his pulse also quickened, for this was an opportunity if there ever was one. Jack had been laboriously teaching him how to swim ever since… well, there had been far too many unfortunate incidents between Stephen and the water to count, and they had been at it a while. The shore was a mere two hundred yards distant, and besides that, the waves were drawing them toward it. If he could descend while they were engaged in lowering the boats, then it would be only a short paddle and a long wade before he was safe ashore—well, if the word “safe” could be said to apply to someone walking into the mouth of an inferno. But there was nothing to burn on the beach: if worse came to worse, he could simply walk east parallel to the shore, sea lapping at his ankles, until he came to something that was not on fire. To the west were of course the cliffs, which dropped off into deeper water, so he would try to angle eastwards as he swam.

With that thought, he was settled in his decision. He had no shoes to feel guilty about casting off, having never been supplied with them. The shirt was much too large for him, and would grow waterlogged and heavy and drag behind his arms in the water, so he took it off. He kept the undershirt for warmth, and the trousers to protect his legs from any stray sharp corals that might be lurking under the waves, and then, before his courage could desert him, he leaped over the side with a splash.

The cold of the ocean always came as a shock to him, and so it was perhaps even more shocking that this water was warm—not just tolerably cool, but actually warm, almost like bathwater. Even the Atlantic off Brazil had not been this warm. He propelled himself with awkward thrusts of his arms and broke the surface of the water thoroughly disoriented. Blinking salt out of his eyes, he struggled to find a point of reference. Surely it should not be so difficult to find the ship one has just leaped from? With a start, he realized she was practically on top of and behind him, the timbers groaning unhappily with the stress of lying upon the sandbar. He backed water, again with his arms, drawing them back and forth, “just like making a snow angel, that’s it,” came Jack’s encouraging voice in his ear.

Jack, what a fool, doing this sort of thing voluntarily. Water was his Jack’s element; Stephen could not hope to approach his skill there, but he could at least honor their long friendship and Jack’s hours of patient teaching by not drowning in it. He swallowed only a little water as he lengthened the distance between the ship and himself, but he found himself ill at ease. His arms were already tiring, as were his lungs, and it seemed he could barely keep his nose above the water. Without the assurance of Jack’s presence, his old anxiety in the water returned, and he found himself making quick, jerky movements rather than the smooth strokes that Jack had always endorsed. “Like petting a cat, Stephen. It is no use thrashing about.” He forced himself to move more slowly, and the burning in his shoulders grew less severe.

To avoid tiring himself, he flipped from his back, where he had used the vantage to watch the _Fantastique_ and make sure she was not about to bear down and crush him, to his front, where he could at least make use of some different muscle groups. Instantly he inhaled a noseful of water, and coughed and gagged desperately to get it out.

“What’s that?”

Stephen froze, instantly sank, resorted to some desperate paddling to right himself. God grant that they had not spotted him…before he had time to think better of it, he flipped onto his back again to see if the men on the deck of the _Fantastique_ were looking at him, or if something else had captured their attention.

As he turned, the light of the deck lantern fell upon his face, and he looked his guard straight in the eyes.

“It’s the prisoner!” the man cried, surprise making him honest. “The doctor—the spy—it’s him!”

“What?” came another voice; the height of the deck, and his distance from the side, prevented Stephen from seeing his face, but then the captain stepped up next to Gerard, drawing his spyglass out, and Stephen’s heart sank.

There was a hurried conference on deck; Stephen had seen enough. He paddled as quickly as he dared without dunking his head. Would they bother to send a boat to recapture him, or would they try to shoot him and kill him? Any shot on target would be deadly—he would drown before they could reach him. The captain’s decision depended, as such decisions often did, upon innumerable factors: the threat of fire on the ship, their current predicament with the sandbar, their orders, the perceived value of Stephen’s intelligence versus the danger of him making a clean getaway, his own judgment of wind and time, his personal inclinations towards risk and reward…

A deathly whistle, close by his ear, and a splash. They were shooting at him. If he were Jack, he would have dived down under the water, making a game of it with reflection, refraction, and the waves. He was not Jack, and so he remained, if not a sitting duck, a very sadly paddling one. Another whistle, and the ball passed far over his head. A particularly high wave seized him and bore him up, as though the sea was offering him to his enemies, and it was at the crest of this wave that he was hit. Pain tore through his right arm, just above the elbow, and he cried out. The wave dropped him down, down, and then the next curled up cruelly over his head and smashed him under.

Stephen became a set of three uncoordinated, flailing limbs, sometimes pointing to the air, sometimes the bottom, sometimes to sea and more sea. He had managed to draw in one great breath and hold it before the wave took him, but he was so buffeted about that he could not even tell which way was up, and he had no natural buoyancy to bring him to the surface. At last he brushed the bottom with the fingertips on his uninjured arm, and had the good sense to draw his legs in under himself and push off. The surface of the water, fathoms above him, danced black and orange, not proper water colors at all, and he wondered if this was his mind, starved of air, painting the world in fantastic hues before he died.

He broke the surface gasping, and in his haste swallowed more water. His hair was plastered over his eyes, and he could not see—he was sinking—

His flailing arm caught onto something, and he seized it, kicking his way closer and biting back a howl when he forgot his injured arm and reached out with it. Bright light and heat in his face made him look up, and he nearly forsook his lifeline then and there, for it was aflame; a pile of dock wreckage, dry wood good to float and good to burn. Yet he took respite while he could. It was sorely needed; his head spun after holding his breath for so long. Salt water stung evilly in the bullet wound on his right arm, but it did not seem to be too incapacitating; he had certainly been nicked, but he had taken much worse hurts in his time.

He cursed himself for the worst kind of idiot—he was in the middle of the sea, clinging to a flaming raft—did he not have the sense he was born with? Fire, a most pressing threat to his safety—water, all around him. He hung on with one hand and flung great handfuls of sea upon the flames.

The surface of the sea caught fire. Stephen had never in his life seen such a thing, but he had heard it described, and within a few seconds his brain supplied him with an explanation: the planks to which he clung were soaked through and through with some oily substance, one that burned steady and hot and floated upon the surface of water. If he were to wager a guess, he would say it was unrefined whale oil; common on ships, and therefore on docks. If some had spilled—or if the barrels containing it had begun to leak, their wood eaten away by fire, well, then, it was easy to explain how the docks might come to be covered in the stuff. Bad luck for him, though, for the oil was immiscible with water, and would continue to burn no matter how he doused it. Furthermore, if he continued to physically splash the oil off his raft, the burning oil would likely spread in a slick across the surface of the waves. Then he would almost certainly die, for as bad a swimmer as he was with his head above the water, he was even worse with it below, not even capable of choosing his direction. He would be just as likely to inhale water and drown, or thrust his head straight back up into the flames, as he would be to actually succeed in escaping. His best option was to remain as still as possible, and hope the flaming oil’s natural greater affinity for wood than wave kept it confined to the raft, which he could abandon insofar as he could swim at will.

When the heat on his fingers grew painful, he shifted his grip. Very soon he would have no place at all to hang on, and so he looked about, planning his next move. The seventy-fours were quite close, forward and a little east of him. The beach, the landing-place he had aimed for, was eastward still, with one solitary boat upon it. He wondered if he could make enough way east, with the tide pushing him in, to make the beach, or if he would find himself caught behind the frigates: an unappetizing proposition, given they were packed to the brim with the French. He still might manage to slip past, though, under the cover of the same chaos that had allowed him to escape the _Fantastique_. After all, the seventy-fours were even closer to the flames, and therefore even more endangered by them. As with the _Fantastique_ , their captains had decided against setting any sails, however, this meant they could not move from their vulnerable positions, and were forced to put out fires on deck as they caught. Indeed, it seemed at least one of them had not been entirely successful; Stephen could see the curtains inside the windows of the captain’s cabin burning merrily away.

Directly ahead were the docks, burning if anything more fiercely than the last time he had looked. At least two fishing boats had caught, one in the very act of casting off, and embers were still going up at an alarming rate. Westward, the cliffs, tall and sharp and forbidding in black silhouette against the blue-black sky. He chanced a glance backward. Oh, the _Fantastique_ had caught!

He jerked his hand back with a hiss; so involved was he in the observation of his surroundings that he had not noticed the flames approaching across his makeshift raft. Well, he had not come to a decision yet, but it seemed he was not going to get the chance to reason it out in relative comfort after all.

The snarl of wood heeled over, dunking Stephen as it did so. Stephen plunged under the waves once more, closing his mouth so quickly his teeth snapped together, so that only a little sea came in despite his surprise. He scrabbled his arms, desperate for the surface—he had not had time to suck in a proper breath—when a strange instinct made him look up. The underskin of the water was livid orange: flaming oil was directly above his head. He stilled and sank, chest tightening already but for once grateful for his complete lack of natural buoyancy; if he had been Jack, he would have popped up through the flames like a cork. He took a few lopsided frogstrokes towards a patch of water that showed the deep black of the night sky, progress painfully slow. When at last he surfaced, at the very edge, he had taken at least three deep gulps of air before he felt the pain in his back. He had not made it quite free—his undershirt had caught—he ripped it off as quickly as he could, given that it was on fire and he could barely stay afloat as it was. The fingers on his already-injured right arm were singed quite badly, as was his back, but he managed to stay free of the rest of the flaming oil, and thereby avoided burning to death then and there.

He could only tread water for a while, occasionally kicking in a shoreward direction waiting for the fresh pain to recede a little. The shock of his injuries and most of all the fatigue of having been in the water so long were beginning to tell on him already. When he next checked his position he was baffled to see the docks far off to his right, the cliffs practically towering overhead. A current must have taken him, one of those pernicious ones running parallel to the shore, and he had better act quickly, or else be swept around the headland entirely. He had dearly wished not to approach the cliffs, for the water looked deep around them, and he had not the strength to climb. But they were his last option, now—to their west was a deep inlet, over a mile wide, and it was into that inlet that the current was now trying to drag him… he would be drowned, drowned for certain: a terrible, gasping, panicking death, and no-one but the Dear would ever know what had happened to him.

He began swimming, in much the same thrashing, violent style that had so deservedly earned Jack’s chagrin when their lessons began. “What have I told you? Smoothly. You might as well hit a tiger as hit a rough sea.”

Stephen had mockingly threatened to hit Jack’s face, at the time, but now he modulated his pace, cupping his hands and pulling them through the water as he had been instructed. His feet, too, he remembered at last, and his progress quickened considerably once he put them to proper use, kicking away steadily behind. Closer to shore, the waves grew taller, more violent, heaving him up and down six or seven feet at times. At least there were no breakers by the cliffs, to crash over his head; they were most common on the beach, where the shallowing sands made them rear out of the water and tipped their crests over. Then again, as he grew nearer and nearer to the great black rocks, he realized that they were not barren, as he had foolishly imagined, but coated with sharp mollusks and various and sundry bivalves, their casings open to catch the nutrients of the tide. He would have to come in carefully, or else have his already-battered hands sliced to ribbons.

The waves betrayed him. He came close under one of the cliffs, within maybe six feet, deep in the trough of a wave. As the wave rose, a portion of it broached a gap in the cliff just to the side of him, and the water surged forward, taking him with it. He was not quite sucked into the gap, but he was smashed full-body against the cliff.

It was the very height of the wave that saved him, for, as he had often observed to Jack, the tidal flora and fauna arranged themselves in distinct ribbons along the cliff according to their diet and how wet they prefer to get. It was not uncommon to see distinct communities of species, such that the whole set of creatures five feet above had not a single member in common with those five feet below. Five feet was the approximate distance between Stephen’s nose and his shins. His nose hit nubby little barnacles, tough fellows who could clamp up against the heat of the sun. The collision was painful, but he had managed to slow himself with his hands enough that nothing was broken. His shins, by contrast, were cruelly laid open by the mouths of countless mussels, and he cried out in agony as all his toes were stubbed against the rocks.

Another wave slammed into his back—he had instinctively clung to the rocks as the first receded—and he managed this time to lift his feet up as he was buoyed by the water, drawing them out of the domain of those open-mouthed horrors, the bivalves. Of what profit was it to a bivalve to have edges so sharp?

The waves came regularly, and with each one he attempted to inch his way towards a space he had sighted a dozen feet to his right, where their smashing did not seem quite so violent. He got the hang of it eventually— _the hang of it_ , oh, the shame, perhaps not so bad as “curtailed,” but, oh, he would have to tell Jack—and soon had found a little more of a refuge, where the sea level still went from his knees at one moment to his shoulders at the next, but at least was not also shoving his face into solid rock three times in a minute.

There he decided to rest and gather his strength, for he was thoroughly exhausted. His limbs trembled, for though the water was warm enough, the air was not, and he was on average about half-exposed to it. He had lost even what feeble protection the undershirt had provided, and his canvas breeches had been sliced straight through in places, although they had spared his shins the worst of it; they were laid open some, but not to the bone, and he did not think they would require too much stitching, if by some miracle he could get off this purgatorial cliff and acquire some needle and thread.

As far as getting off the cliff went, he briefly floated the idea—ha, _floated_ , oh, how he wished Jack were here to swim them both to safety, he would tolerate a few bad puns for that, especially since it seemed in Jack’s absence his own mind, disoriented by their deficit, was determined to remedy their supply—of letting the rising tide lift him up to the top of the cliff face. He was discouraged in this notion by two facts: first, he was not sure if it would bring him all the way to the top, or just close to it. The distribution of barnacles seemed to argue for the second option, for their pebbly white bumps, clearly visible in the brightness of the full moon, vanished entirely eight or ten feet from the top. Usually barnacles could be found not just where the sea reached, but even up to where the tiniest drops of spray landed. So, unless the full moon would be pulling the tide a good ten feet higher than it typically stood, he could not count on a lift from the sea.

How he wished he were better able to swim! On the _Surprise_ , starting out, he had been able to swim the entire length of the ship without too terrible a difficulty. But then again, the _Surprise_ had been in calm waters at the time, not at all like these pernicious cross currents and chopping waves. And, of course, he had been in practice at the time—there was a good deal to be said for being in practice—and, then again, also, he had been rather better-nourished, due to Bonden, Jack, and Sophie cosseting him at all times, infuriating, well-intentioned, medicine-ignorant creatures; whereas today he was coming off a voyage of many months, the lime juice reduced to something more like lime water, almost homeopathic in its level of dilution, and until they taken on fresh greens and citrus at Kinakuta, he had been beginning to worry about scurvy in not only himself, but also in Jack, whose old wounds were beginning to look tender and pink again. Lord, he hoped the French would have the good sense to give their English prisoners greenstuffs on the journey back to Europe, else they would not have a healthy man among them when they arrived, and likely a good many dead. And there was, too, the case to be made for the importance of more proximal nourishment, for he had been given only thin gruel on the _Fantastique_ , and had been dining at the captain’s table most every day on the _Surprise_.

Still, mild case of scurvy and general lack of food aside, when he had swum the length of the _Surprise_ he had been recovering from torture. A more persuasive anecdote for the goods of proper nutrition, he thought, could not be devised.

While all these thoughts were going round in his head, he was still clapped firmly to the cliff face, the waves buffeting his back, but without their previous inexorable strength. The disadvantage of his little protected cove was that he could not see out of it all that well, and he wished to gain a better view of the ships and their progress against the fires. The exertions of staying locked so vigorously in one position were already making themselves known, his hands and his legs beginning to cramp. He inched out of his shelter a little, braving the stronger waves, and glanced over his right shoulder to see what he could see of the fires.

Calamity and utter ruin aboard the _Fantastique_ : that was certain, at least. They had launched the boats in the attempt to haul the ship off the sandbar, and now these same boats were busily trawling through the flaming wreck of the ship, picking up survivors. It seemed they had doused the powder quite thoroughly, or perhaps even thrown it overboard, because there was none of the frantic movement, nor immediate breaking off and rowing for shore, that might indicate the rescuers feared for their lives.

Now there was a stroke of luck, indeed, one that was entirely unexpected for its lack of precedent this night. In the confusion of the fire, the few men who had shot at him might easily be drowned, or at very least persuaded after the fact that they were mistaken. Official reports could become jumbled and confused; he had seen it happen all of its own accord. The facts: _Midst of a fire, Stephen Maturin overboard, shots fired with possible hits, ship burnt down to the waterline, no sign of Maturin_ … yes, he could see even the most cautious enemy spy-chief reading that report and giving a little sigh that all of Stephen Maturin’s valuable intelligence had been lost to the waves.

He found his head drooping towards his chest, and roughly shook himself awake. He could not under any circumstances allow himself to fall asleep, for the slightest lapse would cause his grip on the rough rock to slacken. Then he would be pulled off in the trough of the wave and smashed back into the cliff on its peak, and while this would surely waken him if it did not kill him, he did not think he could stand to be knocked about much more this night; he was already bleeding in three or four places on his shins, had the bullet wound in his right arm (still dripping watery blood, and he had doubtless left a very good trail through the water, for any predator to follow—but he did not _think_ sharks would dare come this close to the cliffs), and burns on his back and his fingertips.

Usually, the tonic activity of his mind was so great that he scarcely had trouble staying up all night; indeed, shutting it down was often the greater problem, one he had solved by dosing himself with laudanum over the years. Yet now, in his great exhaustion, it threatened to spin off in the other direction, weaving utterly nonsensical thoughts together into glittering braids: if the blue-footed booby would consent to attend Molly Harte’s ball, then perhaps Sir Joseph could be persuaded to let Jack marry Sophie… _Testudo aubreii_ would most certainly be worth a great deal of prize-money…

He shook himself. “Jack and Sophie are already married,” he said aloud, and turned to watch the action, forcing his mind to focus, for falling into this kind of delirium would be as bad as falling asleep.

The two seventy-fours were not in quite as bad a shape as the _Fantastique_ , despite their greater proximity to the source of the embers, for they had not run aground and therefore had not felt the need to deploy the greater company of their fire fighting men in the ships’ boats. If Stephen had been unable to distinguish them from the relatively near position of his improvised and sadly fiery raft, he was certainly not able to do so now. It seemed that men of both ships were busily engaged in dragging sailcloth through the water; they had a good deal of it spread out on deck, a terrible risk, and were hauling it over the side on hooks and allowing it to become quite soaked.

The orange glow in the aft cabin of the one seventy-four had grown positively hellish, reflecting in the black waters below; he was very surprised nobody had noticed it yet. Or perhaps they had, and there was simply nothing—

For one hot moment, it as though he stared straight into the sun, and then all turned purple-black. In the next instant, he was slapped hard into the cliffs—not be a wave of water, but a wave of sound, so loud that it was a physical force as much as an auditory event. His ears popped painfully from the pressure change, and the very air seemed to be forced from his lungs. Yet very soon he was able to draw breath and turn his head back to the ships. His abused eyes detected a column of flame, bright as daylight, livid yellow-white, and drawn very hard out to sea by the wind. If his ears had been functioning properly, he knew, he would have been able to hear the deathy roar of the wind and the fire. As he watched, he saw splashes in the water, some of them very great: the pieces of the ship, blasted high, high into the air, obeying gravity’s summons back to the sea. Last were the pieces of sailcloth, unfurled by the explosion, some burning, floating down like great white moths of fire and death, or angels sent to fetch the souls of the men who had certainly just perished.

 _The powder has gone up_ , Stephen realized at last. He had heard Jack speak of it before, when it occurred at the Nile, but he had never—

Stephen’s heart went cold.

Jack, and the entire officer’s compliment of the _Surprise_ , had been chained in the hold aboard one of those two ships. There would have been no chance at all of escaping that explosion; Jack had told him himself that when the powder went up not a man aboard could hope to survive.

All of Stephen’s being crystallized in that moment into a single fervent prayer: _please, please, please let it be the other ship. Please let them be safe. God, please—_ they had faced so many dangers together, seen so much of the world, shared in so many triumphs and griefs, fought the same enemies; they had come close to murdering one another, they had nursed one another through countless wounds and heartaches, they had played so many damned duets across six continents and four oceans, had shared, in short, more of their lives and more of their hearts than doubtless a good many husbands and wives had, and he _could not lose Jack_ , not after all this, not after all they had seen…

He soon fell into a waking stupor. He did not weep, but pleaded softly to himself: _please, please, please_.

It was some hours later, just as the yellowish light of dawn began to show on the eastern horizon, that he fell at last.

He came awake lungs full of water, choking and sinking, blinded, ears filling—this was it, he drowned—

His knees hit sand. A moment later, so did his hands.

He kicked off, and an instant later his head broke the surface. The water was up to his chest. As he stood a wave came in, and he was forced to push off the bottom to keep his head up. He coughed and retched, water streaming from his mouth, his nose, but he was alive. The black cliffs loomed above him. It was low tide.

He staggered towards shore, wet sand sucking at his bare feet. The eastern sky was glowing orange and pink through the distant trees and tangled masts by the time he reached dry land. Twenty more yards he trudged, sand fleas flying all around his ankles, until he stood beneath a great towering tree. He found two massive roots and curled up between them, and had hardly let his eyes fall shut before he was dead asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we discover why Stephen, and not Jack, is the spy.

Jack had only a fraction of a second in which to react when he saw the _Hieroglyphe_ go up. He flung himself to the beach with his hands clapped over his ears, and a moment later was smashed flat into the sand by the force of the blast. Heat seared the exposed back of his neck; a moment later seawater crashed over him, driven up far onto the beach by the enormous force of the explosion. He remained prone for another moment as debris rained down, some quite large enough to kill a man: part of a great gun housing, likely weighing half a ton, smashed down not a yard from his head.  
  
A dozen feet away the _Hieroglyphe_ 's surgeon was likewise flat on the ground; he had clapped one hand to his chest, an agonized expression on his face. Jack crawled to his side. The surgeon had been cleaning his instruments when the explosion hit, and it seemed that when the shockwave knocked him to earth the scalpel had gone straight through the palm of his hand. One of the sailors from the _Hieroglyphe_ had also made his way over, and he ripped his shirt and wrapped it around the wound as the ashen-faced surgeon watched.  
  
Seven men had been in the boat as it made its way ashore: their commanding officer, Christy-Palliere, was now dead, God rest his soul, and the surgeon, the only other officer, was in a state close to shock. This left four French sailors and Jack. His status as a prisoner was known to them, and though their ship had just exploded and orders were far from their minds, they knew well enough that allowing him to escape would not end well for them. One clapped a pistol to Jack's head with an air of nonchalance that suggested he would have no compunctions about using it.  
  
There was the prisoner taken care of, then, but what were they to do now? The men attempted to confer amongst themselves, but it was quickly discovered that none of them could hear a word the others said. Jack, with his hands over his ears during the explosion, had fared a little better, but he had heard the (shouted) accounts of the men who had been too close to _L'Orient_ at the Nile, and understood the French sailors' affliction might prove permanent.  
  
One by one the men threw up their hands in disgust at their attempts to communicate; eventually they all sat down in the sand, and thus it was decided—if ‘decided’ was the right word –that they should wait on the beach and watch the burning hulk of their former vessel sink beneath the waves. One or two of them wept; doubtless many of their comrades had perished. They did not understand why Jack also had tears in his eyes: the transfer of Surprises to _Le Marechal_ , the other 74-gun ship, had been incomplete, and though he did not know which of his men had perished, some certainly had, and his mind kept conjuring up faces and names of the possible dead as if it wished to torment him. Only one member of his crew was definitely safe, and that was Stephen, aboard _Fantastique_ , far out in the harbor.  
  
The bitter untruth of this thought was revealed almost as soon as _Hieroglyphe_ sank completely, revealing the harbor for all to see. A sloop, almost certainly _Fantastique_ , was listing far to one side, aground on a sandbar, and her boats were struggling to pull her off. Jack noted with growing concern that numerous fires had caught on her deck, and it seemed that the attempted rescue must surely turn into a salvage operation.  
  
Still, Jack reasoned, the situation was far from hopeless for Stephen: as a valuable political prisoner, his life would doubtless be among those chief on the _Fantastique_ 's captain's mind. Even with that, though, there was no guarantee—a ship grounded, aflame, half-sinking—would the captain remember the lone prisoner in the brig, in the chaos? Would the guards do their duty to their charge, or would panic and selfishness seal Stephen's fate? Jack stood and began to pace up and down the beach, noting from the corner of his eye the pistol that tracked his movements. He could not see Stephen in the dark, this far away from what was rapidly becoming the _Fantastique_ 's wreck, but that did not mean he had perished. He simply could not know.  
  
The boats from the _Fantastique_ made for the beach west of the dockyards, which lay under the lee of a series of great sharp cliffs that jutted out to form the western rim of their natural harbor. The docks and the village itself lay between Jack and their destination, but he thought he saw a solution. Approaching the nearest French sailor, he pointed to the boats, then to their own party, then mimed the course along the beach that would take them there. The message, he hoped, was plain enough: shall we go assist them?  
  
The French sailor gave him a quizzical look, confused, perhaps, at his apparent eagerness to aid his enemy. But the doctor, rallying at last, agreed that this should be their course, and by pointing emphatically conveyed so. They left the corpse of Christy-Palliere wrapped neatly in a boat cloak, the only temporary remedy available to them without spade or shovel, and struck out to meet the boats from the _Fantastique_ , Jack still with a pistol following his movements.

The dockyards were in a state of utter chaos, fires burning everywhere, and so they were forced to take a detour through the village. The wind was blowing straight out to sea, so at least they were not plagued by the hot embers that, it seemed, had doomed many of the French convoy. Most of the villagers, in turn, were engaged in throwing sand on the fires at the docks, so they moved through deserted streets, the hellish red reflection of the fire on its own smoke their only source of light.

They arrived at the harbor beach before even the first of the boats from the _Fantastique_ had made it ashore; a powerful rip current towards the cliffs, combined with the directly contrary wind, made their rowing exceedingly challenging. The party from the _Hieroglyphe_ waded into surf thigh-deep to help guide the first boat in; men bruised, burned, and shocked. Stephen was not among them.

The captain was one of the last men rescued; he would not answer any of the questions asked him by the surgeon of the _Hieroglyphe_ , but only sat and shook his head, one hand half-obscuring his face. All told they plucked threescore men from the waves, not nearly the _Fantastique_ ’s full complement. With every face that was not Stephen’s Jack’s heart sank a little further.

Many of the men had been plucked from the water by the boats after the sinking of the ship; that much was clear from their soaking clothes. Had Stephen gone in the water? Had he been unable to swim? Jack had taught Stephen to paddle himself, had seen him doggedly, slowly make almost the entire length of the _Surprise_ without assistance on a calm day. But if he had been injured—if he had been chained—

Jack swallowed hard and banished the thought. “Excusez-moi,” he tried, taking the arm of a sailor who seemed about to collapse into the surf, “le medicin—“

The man raised an exhausted arm, pointing out a man from the _Fantastique_ ’s boats. Ah, of course, he thought Jack was asking for their own surgeon; Stephen would be known as a prisoner, not by his profession. Still, conversing with the surgeon was not a bad idea; if nothing else, he might speak a little English, and he would certainly know who Stephen was, since he would doubtless have treated the wound on his neck. Jack handed the wounded man over to one of his compatriots, then waded over to the surgeon.

“Excuse me,” he said, taking the man’s arm, “Your prisoner—Doctor Stephen Maturin—have you seen him?”

The surgeon stared uncomprehendingly for a long moment; Jack feared he would have to attempt French again. But then his head snapped up; he looked around himself with growing alarm; he limped as rapidly as he could to the captain and made an inquiry in quiet, rapid French that was no doubt not meant for Jack’s ears. The captain whispered his reply, and the surgeon’s face took on a look of great alarm.

“Who are you?” he said, whirling back on Jack. “What do you know of Maturin?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Jack, hands in the air. “I am his friend, that is all. From the English ship.”

“From the English—are you trying to escape?!”

This was taking a turn for the absurd. “If I am trying to escape, I am doing a piss-poor job. I am looking for Maturin.”

The captain cried out something; immediately Jack was surrounded by the sailors he had only moments ago been helping to shore. One of the original _Hieroglyphe_ men came over and conferred with _Fantastique_ ’s officers. In a trice Jack was ashore, arms trussed behind his back with a spare rope from the boats, a man with a pistol watching his every move.

He still did not know where Maturin was, but hope rose within him. Maturin was gone. The captain knew something, which had discomfited the surgeon. Had they attempted to evacuate Maturin—had he escaped in the chaos? It would be simplicity itself to slip out of a boat—the doctor had done it accidentally lord knew how many times.

Say that were the case, then. Where would he be now?

Like a compass needle drawn by a lodestone, Jack’s eyes went to the black cliffs. The same rip current that had caught the boats would catch Stephen. Not a man alive had the power to swim against one. Stephen might have been swept around the headland into the next inlet over; he might have been dashed senseless against the rocks. This far away, in the dark, Jack could not discern if there were safe grounds in among the forbidding pinnacles, or if Stephen would have been completely at the mercy of wave and stone. _He may be hurt_ , thought Jack. _I must reach him_.

He never got the chance. What remained of the _Fantastique_ ’s company formed up and returned to the village, to aid in fighting the fires. Jack found himself locked in the wine cellar of the French ambassador’s house, there to remain until something more like a real gaol could be found. There, in utter darkness, exhaustion claimed him.

* * *

Jack was still exhausted the next morning when he was woken by _Fantastique_ ’s surgeon and interrogated as to Maturin’s whereabouts. Although he explained as best he could what had transpired the previous night—dinner with Christy-Palliere, the barrel of power, the explosion, the fire—it sounded fantastical even to his own ears, and clearly the surgeon did not believe a word, starting with the suggestion that Christy-Palliere would have invited Jack to dinner; any Frenchman who could have corroborated the story had died when the _Hieroglyphe_ went up. The sole exception, the _Hieroglyphe_ ’s surgeon, was unconscious, having taken a heavy dose of laudanum to ease the pain of the scalpel-wound to the palm of his hand.

Yet Jack hardly cared if the man believed him; this interrogation was practically proof that Stephen had escaped the _Fantastique_ before it sank. Believing Jack to be a co-conspirator, and furious at his seeming refusal to drop the ruse of ignorance, the surgeon grew increasingly careless with his assertions until Jack was able to deduce almost to the moment when Stephen had gone missing from the other ship: after the _Hieroglyphe_ had caught fire, but before her powder magazine exploded. Triumph for his friend’s success glowed in his heart; a triumph so fierce that even thirty lashes, meant to loosen his tongue, did not entirely extinguish it. He said nothing about the rip current, nothing about the cliffs. If they could not figure it out themselves, they would never know.

* * *

Resting facedown in the wine cellar after his punishment, half-insensible, he did not hear the angry villagers as they accused the French of bringing fire and ruin down upon them, but he was aware of being lifted; of every jarring step as he was carried away to the _Marechal_ , of the taunts and jeers that followed. _Chased out of town_ , he deduced, with some smugness.  _Serves the bastards right_. Then came the familiar motion of a ship—the smells and the darkness belowdecks—an iron door unlocked, hands taking him, a happy exclamation.

“It’s the captain!”

Jack’s eyes slid open, and in the dimness he perceived a great number of Surprises gathered round.

“Yes, we all see,” came another voice. Bonden. Oh, thank God, Bonden was alive. “He’s in a bad way. Handsomely, now. Sir—the boat cloak, here—that’s it.”

Many hands aided him to the planking; his face came to rest in a folded cloak. “That is most considerate, thank you,” he murmured, before the darkness called him back.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Graphic, graphic violence. When stuff blows up bad things happen. I will provide a summary of this chapter at the beginning of the next chapter if you don't want to read this one.

Stephen slept like the dead for much of the rest of the day, waking only once when a crab scuttled over his face. When he woke the sun was already low. The shade of the tree had protected him from its glare, but his back and fingers were still swollen and angry pink—thank God, they had not blistered—his shins cruelly sliced; worst of all, his throat was parched, his lips cracked, and his head pounding for lack of water. Pressing into the jungle a few hundred yards, he discovered a mangosteen tree, and ate two with ravenous intensity, the juice running down his salt-encrusted skin. Back at the beach he followed a seabird to a cache of turtles’ eggs, which they ate, together, raw. After that he felt almost human, and was able to consider his situation a little more logically.

If he shaded his face with a hand against the setting sun, he could peer back towards the smoldering docks. There were no ships moored there, but out to harbor were at least two, one of which was large enough and of the correct general shape to be a seventy-four. Jack and all the rest of the crew might very well be on board that ship, alive and well and probably very concerned for Stephen’s welfare, if they had indeed heard the news that the _Fantastique_ had gone up, or gone down, or gone up and then gone down, or whatever the devil it was… perhaps in this case the word “gone” alone would suffice.

With Stephen missing and reported overboard, it was very likely the French would assume him dead, and Jack would have no reason to think their information inaccurate. Stephen hated to leave his friend with such an awful impression, but in truth the current situation served him very well, for if nobody knew he was alive, then nobody would be looking for him, and he would find it much easier to sink Napoleon’s newly-expanded empire if it was unaware of his continued existence.

Any attempt to reveal the fact that he was alive and well to Jack would almost certainly give the game away to the French. Stephen would be recaptured, and the whole thing would be for naught. He considered the question deeply. If their places were reversed, and Jack now found himself suddenly escaped and assumed dead, would Stephen be greatly offended if Jack allowed him to continue thinking him dead, and resumed valuable intelligence work in service of the doom of their common enemy? Surely, surely Jack would not take offense? Rationally he could not. And yet Stephen felt the crushing mixture of grief and hope in his chest, and knew that rationality barely touched the matter. Were their positions reversed, he would feel very ill-used indeed if Jack did not at least make an attempt at assuring Stephen of his continued survival. He could at least try to send some message… make some secret sign…

Of course, that assumed Jack was still alive. Since not assuming this sent Stephen spiraling towards despair, that was the assumption he would carry with him until he received evidence to the contrary. One ship had survived, one had gone up: his happiness depended upon a coin-flip. It was a better chance than some he had had; a better chance than many ever received on this Earth. Yet it seemed wondrous cruel.  

He made his way along the beach just beneath the water line, the waves lapping at his swollen feet. The tide was coming in. The docks lay ahead of him, to the east, and the sun shone brilliantly on his back before it ducked behind the cliffs for the night. Fluffy, white clouds abounded on the horizon, and as the sun dipped they turned outlandish shades of pink, orange, and gold, the light filtering between them and haloing them with brilliance. Even the surface of the ocean turned orange: a buttery, benevolent color, nothing like the hellfire of the previous night.

Tracks on the beach, now, in straggling ones and twos. A corpse at the high waterline, buzzing with blueflies, many species, distinct from those that swarmed the seaweed. It was a sailor, dressed in the usual sailors’ clothes: in all probability French, to go by the composition of the ships in port, yet in death there was no way of knowing. The corpse had already bloated in the tropical heat. Not a hundred yards after him came the burnt-out hull of a ship’s boat, and the smell of roasted flesh. After that the wreckage and ruin was everywhere: barrels of olives, spilling out on the sand; bolts of cloth; rope; sail; pieces of crate and dock, some charred beyond all recognition. The docks had burned so quickly that many pieces had dropped, still burning, into the sea, and now that the tide had turned back around it had thrown up much of the wreckage here.

Stephen caught the unmistakeable glint of gold in the sand, followed it to a small lockbox, its lock still intact, its hinges smashed, its contents spilt. A small fortune winked back at him. Spoils from a captured Indiaman, almost certainly. Stephen took two small rings only, easy to secret about his person, in case it became necessary to bribe any unscrupulous Frenchmen he came across. The rest he left behind.

He had scarcely gone another ten steps when he encountered a severed hand, quite newly bloody. Stephen had a strong stomach, and did not flinch, but nor did he look too long, conscious that it might belong to someone he knew—had once known. He was now entering the debris-field of the exploded seventy-four.  

 He closed his eyes to it, but he could not close his nose; nor indeed his ears, which heard the hungry cries of his beloved sea birds, descending now to feast upon the flesh of men. And indeed, he was soon forced to open his eyes, or else find himself kicking fragments of vertebrae, dragging his feet through slurries of blood and sea foam, messes of guts and other organs. It was mockery of the human body: all the constituent pieces ripped away from one another, souls fled long past, shards and scraps of tissue the only thing left.

He passed through the worst of it on the way to the docks. A full three quarters of the dockyard had been completely destroyed, and the remaining quarter was barely functioning. One building in town had caught as well, but there the fire had been extinguished; local gossip told him that the very fury of the wind, which had so neatly condemned all the ships, had protected the town. The word in town as night fell was good: the French had all been driven out in a riot scarce hours before Stephen arrived. It seemed that the few remaining native boats had been sent out to neighboring islands, requesting help; the French brig, too, was gone in hope of further orders, for it seemed that Christy-Palliere had been lost at some point before the explosion of the _Hieroglyphe_.

The _Hieroglyphe_ , then. The wrong ship, the ship that had held every last man off the _Surprise_. _I will not have to send word to Jack after all_ , Stephen thought. He was conscious of the moon swinging giddily above, of a fly buzzing in his ear, very loudly, and then abruptly he was thudding into the ground. Nobody helped him up; they thought him drunk, perhaps, or maybe they just had too many troubles to begin to help a stranger. Eventually he crawled under the eaves of someone’s hut, too shot through with exhaustion to even properly grieve, feeling his heart turn all over to black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To recap names of ships:
> 
> Fantastique: a small sloop where Stephen was confined by himself, suspected of being a spy for England. Burned to the waterline, with some of the crew surviving. Stephen escaped in the confusion and is presumed drowned.
> 
> Hieroglyphe: a 74-gun ship where Jack and the Surprises were kept in the brig. Developed a water cask leak, necessitating transfer of the English prisoners to the Marechal. Christy-Palliere came aboard to have dinner with Jack before he was moved, but was fatally injured in the first (small) explosion. Jack went to assist Christy-Palliere in an emergency surgery ashore, which is why he wasn't caught in the second explosion, in which the Hieroglyphe was completely destroyed.
> 
> Marechal: a 74-gun ship previously captained by Christy-Palliere. Survived the fire with minimal scorching. Now home to all the Surprises transferred from Hieroglyphe, plus Jack.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, a summary of the previous chapter. Stephen wakes up on the beach near the cliffs around sundown. He crosses the beach, strewn with debris from the seventy-four, and finds a smashed strongbox there. He takes two rings for the purpose of possibly bribing anyone who recognizes him. In the village he discovers that the French have been driven out of town because the local population (justly) blames them for last night's disaster. Finally, he discovers that the seventy-four that blew up was the Hieroglyphe. Thinking, erroneously, that Jack and the entire crew of the Surprise was aboard, he sinks to the ground in despair.

Stephen’s attempts at Urdu and his first gold ring got him onto a trader that came into port some three days after the great disaster. It was a dirty, pestilential ship, much crowded with rats, and it was only its lack of virtue that preserved it from the French, who were desperate and eager for new vessels, so many of their own having been destroyed. Too, the captain and all his men went about with scimitars slung across their backs and pistols tucked into every loose scrap of clothing, which greatly discouraged the French from approaching. The price of passage aboard was sold quite dear, and it was the Urdu, rather than the treasure, that tipped the difference; for the captain was a discerning man, and did not wish to serve filthy foreigners who would not even know how to speak with him; much better to have aboard this raggedy, pale-eyed, skin-and-bones stranger with a bandage wrapped round his arm, who could quote poetry in the captain’s native tongue and drank tea like a civilized person with his legs crossed beneath him on the ground.

The dhow’s crew was even motlier than the usual assortment seen in the Indian Ocean; a good deal of Indians of all castes, and Malays, some Chinese, a number of Arabs and Somalis, and a number who belonged to nations even farther flung. There was a man who looked almost like a Mongol but wore his hair braided and soft leather beaded shoes; and there was another, squat and very dark, with close-wired hair as yellow as that of any Swede Stephen had yet encountered; and there was a genuine Tajik, whose ability to reef sail was evidently not impaired despite the fact that his whole native tribe’s lands were double and in some directions triple landlocked. In age they ranged from seven (a curly-haired boy with eyes the color of honey and calluses already rough on his palms), to about seventy (a man with a rheumy cataract in one eye and sagging blue tattoos across every inch of his wrinkled skin).

The notion of “keeping a trim ship,” as Jack would have called it, was foreign to the dhow’s crew insofar as the Royal Navy’s obsessive cleanliness was concerned, yet in the matter of following orders instantly, of cohering as a unit, and of making sail like one massive organism in perfect communication with all its parts, they were entirely within the Royal Navy’s league. Indeed, if the ship had not been completely devoid of great guns, Stephen would have rated its chances against a small European ship quite well.

As it was, they made their living disreputably enough by preying on small local cargo, taking it unawares and then sweeping the deck with musket-shot, then boarding with grappling hooks and slaughtering the crews with abandon. This Stephen gathered from a short but illuminating conversation with the captain shortly after they set sail. Yet he did not have to concern himself that the captain might wish him to join; they had prospered already, and now all that remained was to transport the goods for sale. They would make their way to the gateway of the Red Sea, Aden, and thence deep into the Red Sea itself, where their final destination was Aqaba, controlled by the Turks. Aqaba was farther east than entirely suited Stephen, but at least the Turks were not allied with Napoleon, and he supposed he might barter his abilities as translator, cryptographer, or surgeon to gain passage through the Mediterranean and on to England.

England: most perilous and most necessary of destinations. Sir Joseph Blaine would be there, and many other contacts in his intelligence network besides, and though Stephen had no doubts that his name and general description would be given away by informers, and broadly known, there was a good deal to be said for the fact that he had already been captured once and was presumed dead. He would have to take his time crossing the Med, or he might actually arrive in England before the news of his death did, for though the dhow was slow, Stephen was taking by far the more direct route home than the French packet-ships, which would first have to call at the wretchedly burnt-out port, then receive what dispatches the officers managed to stitch together from that ruin, then return them to France via the long, dangerous loop round the Cape of Good Hope, thousands of miles out of their way; and then the letters would have to be delivered and decrypted, their relevant information parsed and dispersed to all the suitable field-officers.

It was plain that these field-officers had already been well acquainted with the identity and intelligence role of Doctor Stephen Maturin, despite all his efforts to the contrary, for otherwise they would never have picked him up. No, it was clear: there was a rotten element in the English intelligence service, possibly one very highly positioned, and Stephen’s identity had been leaked possibly even before England’s conquest. Knowledge of this betrayal rankled him greatly, and his fury at the thought of the traitor, together with his burning desire to return to England and begin thwarting Napoleon’s wiles there as soon as possible, were enough to construct a frail edifice, a mere gangplank, over the sea of grief that ever roiled below. If he walked steadily forward, never chancing to look down or about himself, but only putting one foot in front of the other towards his goal, he might yet make it across. But sea or no sea, the memory of Jack Aubrey remained a heavy stone set about his neck, making it perilous difficult for him to progress, and if he allowed himself to fall, it would surely drag him under.

He had no laudanum, nor any cocoa-leaves, nor even cigars to distract him from the tearing grief he felt. What he did have was the crew. Since he was not their doctor, nor an officer of any kind, nor even considered by them to be a particularly exalted or interesting fellow, nor even a particular friend of their captain’s, he found his interactions with them took on a timbre previously unknown to him in his long travels at sea. They thought of him, in short, as almost an equal, though sadly deficient in seamanship and sense, and entering their worlds and learning to speak in their myriad tongues was the mental and social exertion that kept him sane.

One morning the coxswain, or the nearest equivalent the dhow possessed, sniffed the air twice, looked over his left shoulder, and hurriedly fetched the captain from his aft cabin. Then, too, the captain sniffed the air, took one glance in the same direction as the coxswain, and immediately began bawling out orders, there being no elaborate ritual echoing down the chain of command that had initially so bemused Stephen aboard Royal Navy ships. The dhow erupted into a state of more than even the usual activity. Stephen recognized the clearance of the deck, and wondered if an engagement was at hand, but he did not see a sail on the suspicious quarter of the horizon, only an odd greenish haze in the air. Nor could he sniff out whatever it was the coxswain and the captain had both smelt, except perhaps as a whiff of dead fish, which was by no means uncommon in these waters or any other. But when a gust of wind came from the quarter in question, he caught it: an earthy, iron-rich, scent: salty, but not in the way the sea smelled salty, and very alive.

They had skirted the southern reaches of the Arabian peninsula and were now some hundred miles or more off the east coast of Africa, about even with Mogadishu. The lack of obsession with triangulating their exact location, so ubiquitous in the Royal Navy, had at first disconcerted Stephen, but he had soon learned that the men had all been sailing in these waters their whole lives, and knew their currents, breezes, soundings, and other idiosyncracies better than they knew the faces of their own women; gradually, he had come to trust in their knowledge, if not quite as much as he had once trusted Jack’s sextant and navigational tables.

“What is it?” he asked Pradeesh, a deckhand, in Urdu, when the man seemed to have a brief moment between urgent tasks; for though he was fast picking up Tamil, Arabic, and Somali, his Urdu was still by far the best, and indeed he had produced the phrase “A tiger has eaten the postman, will you please send another?” to the general amusement and surprise of the crew on his first day aboard. He had made a point of never speaking English, for although he liked the crew in general he could not believe that any of them would remain loyal to him in the face of coin—they were pirates, after all—but he tutored the ship’s boys in French, and one of them, the curly-haired, proved to have a very great aptitude for it.

Pradeesh uttered a short word that Stephen did not know, and, seeing his look of confusion, followed it with ones he did: _great wind, blackness, heavy rain._

“Ah,” Stephen said, “a hurricano, or typhoon,” and one of the Chinese sailors slapped him on the back and repeated: _tai feng_. Stephen’s Mandarin was poor indeed, but he recognized _feng_ , meaning wind, and _tai_ , meaning sometimes “great” and sometimes “too much,” and knew he had interpreted Pradeesh correctly. The men did not have a barometer aboard, and would not have known how to read it if they did, but they could read the signs nature provided well enough: it was like they and Jack decrypted the same letter through different methods.

Stephen recalled an instance when Jack had asked him, quite concerned, what it was birds did when it rained, and Stephen had been baffled for an instance before saying that he did not know it for certain, but he supposed they had their own ways. He told himself that it was like that with these men: Stephen had never known what the pirates of the Indian Ocean, in their flimsy little dhows, did during a typhoon, but surely they had their own ways. This he said to himself, to reassure his stomach, which fluttered far too much given the yet calm face of the sea: but it did not entirely do the trick, for he recalled omitting to Jack the fact that often birds drowned in the rain. And then again, sometimes they were blown off their courses, hundreds and hundreds of miles, and these likely died at sea from exhaustion of flying so far without rest or refuge; and only the very fortunate among these (one cormorant, perhaps, in ten thousand) lighted upon little islands like the Galapagos, and so populated them with their descendants.

Stephen felt his eyebrows draw together practically of their own accord. There was something significant there: the Galapagos Islands had been colonized by only a very few individuals, of a very few species. Yet on these islands were animals filling every possible role. And too, there were animals he had never yet seen on the mainland: he recalled in particular a finch, with a beak like a nutcracker…

A man, busy with his preparations, knocked into him from behind, and if he had not fallen just as the first great swell brought the deck up into his face, he would have pitched overboard. As it was, his eyebrow was split, and it bled a great deal before the pressure of his hand put a stop to it.

It struck him suddenly how poor a doctor he would be, if it came to that. He was so accustomed to taking his place below during nasty weather, and treating all the men injured in the course of preserving the ship, that it had scarce occurred to him that this would not be his role on the dhow, for, first, he had never represented himself as a doctor to the captain or to the crew, and second, insofar as he could tell, the ship had nothing that could be described as medical supplies barring a few general-purpose knifes, sewing needles, and some bundles of string. He prayed to the Dear that there would be no injuries in the coming blow, for he could do nothing at all to treat them, and he did not know how his soul would bear this grievous insult, of having to watch, and wait, and have no means of providing succor.

In truth, he did not know his place. The thought had a deeper resonance than simple ignorance of where in their tiny ship he was to ride out the storm, and quite upset him as he huddled between two tight-lashed bales of silks, thither ordered by the captain the instant the rain began to drum on deck. Soon the ship began buck heartily, a wild see-sawing motion that jarred his joints. A few hours after that, the height and the distance between the waves altered, sending them into a corkscrewing, half-legged gait that turned Stephen’s stomach with every repetition. He had been sick three or four times, and run out of vomit entirely, by the time the sun set: not that he perceived the sunset, in the blackness of the hold and the completeness of his physical misery. Nor did the hands detect the precise moment of the sunset on deck, for the horizon all the way round was overcovered with dense black and gray bands of clouds; but gradually the darkness grew deeper and deeper until it was clear that the sun was making its way round the other side of the world, and they might never see it again if the storm continued to intensify.

The storm did not intensify, but broke up a good deal a few hours before dawn, the great sheets of rain retreating and the stars and moon peeping out between tattered fragments of cloud. Stephen emerged on deck, stretching his wearied, cramped limbs and cracking all his joints, and most of all breathing the free air again. He swallowed three cups of fresh rainwater water to chase the taste of vomit from his tongue, rinsed off his soiled shirt, and surveyed the exhausted crew a new man. A few contusions and general fatigue, that was all: what a blessing, what a blessing…Sure, the ship had lost her frontmost mast—Stephen had no notion of what to call it, and would not even venture a guess—and there was concern about one of the water-casks, but the men were already scurrying to make the necessary repairs.

A faint yellow light had crept over the eastern horizon when the next band of the typoon struck them. This was if anything more violent than the first, the corkscrewing returning almost immediately, and Stephen scarce had time to fold himself up into his designated rabbit hole before the wind came shrieking and howling to rip apart everything that dared show a hair above deck. Up, down, up, down: continual misery, a consuming desire to sleep overmounted by the complete impossibility of rest.

Cries from above deck, instantly recognizable to a physician. Growing urgency. Stephen unfolding himself, staggering up the ladder, not sure if the horrible shaking was in the timbers or in his arms. Disaster: gravity’s laws overturned, and a boy overboard. A line, hastily tied to a plank and hung with netting, cast after him: small fingers reaching out of the wrinkled sea, a small arm tangling in the netting. Then another great wave, the deck taken about thirty degrees from horizontal, and sweeping them even worse to the side; the desperate scramble to set the tiller right again, and all the time the body dragging behind, the plank tugged under by the fury of the waves. The captain, a pillar on deck, eyes on the train of bubbles that emerged amid the foam atop the sea. The ship made right, the hands scrambling back to the side, heaving all upon the lifeline. Fathoms of cable hauled in, the emergence at last of the log with no boy clinging to it. The scramble to bring the log aboard so that it would not serve as sea-anchor; the discovery of the boy’s body tangled hopelessly in the netting, and here Stephen’s chance, the moment upon which all turned.

“Cut him loose, quickly,” he said in Urdu. None of the men heard him over the squall, and the captain dropped to his knees amid the horrible heaving of the deck, face still blank but something behind it shattered. He took the boy’s face between his hands, brushed the matted and sea-soaked curls back from his forehead.

“There is hope yet,” Stephen said, dropping down beside him. “Cut him loose from the net and—“

The captain struck him across the face, sending him head over heels back across the deck, and he would have pitched overboard if the Tajik had not whipped out a hand to catch him. Yet when Stephen regained his senses the man seemed to have thought better of it, for the boy had been cut loose from the netting, and now the captain stood, one had firmly in the rigging, one hand holding the boy’s limp form close, shielding him still from the worst of the spray and rain.

“What next,” he demanded, across the howling of the storm, and Stephen instructed a man—the Tajik—to move with all speed. Captain and Tajik took an ankle each, hanging the boy upside down, and Stephen seized the child’s shoulders and swung him gently back and forth. Water poured from the boy’s lungs, but he drew in no breaths, and coughed not at all. Stephen had them lower him to the deck, clapped a hand over the mouth, and breathed two full breaths into the boy’s nose. Before they could pick him up again he was retching; in fact, managed to be sick all over the front of Stephen’s shirt, which Stephen could not begrudge, given the circumstances.  

They bundled the boy below at once, Stephen going with him into the captain’s cabin. This was little more than a box towards the front of the ship, but the corkscrewing was not quite so bad here, and it was drier and admitted more light than Stephen’s previous lodgings. They toweled off the boy as best they could. The captain was needed upon deck, and so he disappeared, kissing the boy’s sodden curls before he left.

“Your father?” Stephen asked.

The boy nodded, looking weary and stiff as an old man. Stephen checked over his small frame for injuries, noting superficial lacerations all along the arm that had saved his life by becoming tangled into the netting around the log. The boy held the arm gingerly, close to his side, and seemed to Stephen’s keen and well-practiced eye to be indefinably favoring it, though he was only lying on his back in his father’s cot. When Stephen palpated the area he discovered a dislocated wrist and a fracture of the ulna, which had fortunately not broken the skin. He brought the wrist back to the proper alignment with a very fast motion, which elicited a cry of pain from the boy. He fashioned a makeshift splint from an iron pin and a scrap of cotton cloth, advising the boy to avoid moving the arm if possible; advice that was utterly excessive, for the exhausted child had already dropped off to sleep.

Another half-day passed before the storm was over. Stephen left his patient fully confident of his complete recovery in a matter of a month or less, and assured his worried and worn-out father that all was as well as it could be, given the circumstances. The boy slept still, but stirred at the touch of his father’s massive hand upon his brow. Now that Stephen saw them together, knowing their relation, it was still cryptic to him, for the boy was slight everywhere the captain was large, with apple cheeks like a girl’s where the captain had a great thrusting jaw, and curiously honey-yellow eyes where the captain’s were black. He inquired as to their relation to Pradeesh, who explained the situation more fully: the boy was not the captain’s son, but the son of his greatest, dearest friend, who had been lost along with his wife to a great plague some years ago.

Stephen thought of Jack’s children, of poor, widowed Sophie, and his throat closed up. Could he be to them what the captain was to this boy? Most assuredly not, not with all the will in the world, for he was no Jack, and a family life was not in his character in the least. His life in England would be a hunted life, an unwholesome life, always looking back over his shoulder, with duplicity and paranoia on all sides; he would not ask a fellow human being, much less one he loved, to live in such a manner.

But worry for Sophie ate his conscience: how would the French behave towards her, the wife of one of their most distinguished enemies? He hoped that chivalry, valor, and charity would carry the day, had seen such qualities exhibited by French officers in the past, but he knew that in men, particularly in conquering men, were streaks of such cruelty and pettiness that Sophie would scarce believe them. Oh, how he prayed she and the children were safe! He had no doubt that she would bear any hardship with good grace and stoicism, but how he prayed that she would never need to! If he could, he would protect her, and her children, no matter the cost to himself, for he loved her like a sister, and her children were all now that was left of Jack upon the whole of the Earth.

The storm had taken their foremast, but they had a spare, cleverly stowed, which had escaped the rapacious hands of the French back at their burnt-out port. Within a few hours of the termination of the last furious band of rain, they had swayed it up. Stephen slung up his hammock and caught seven consecutive hours of oblivious sleep, yet woke feeling still tired, careworn, wrung out. The malaise only intensified over the course of the next hour, and then his temperature shot up—he had no way of measuring it, but he recognized the sensations well enough—and, at the same time, he became possessed by chills, sweating through his clothing out upon the deck and yet feeling as though he would never be warm again. Teeth chattering, joints knocking together, he returned below to sweat it out or else die: for this was malaria, he had no doubt, and they had no Peruvian bark aboard.

As the fever mounted, terrifyingly fast, he considered the severity and the majesty of the disease that now held him helpless in his hands: _majesty_ , the only word he could summon, for the terror and the beauty of it: terror, beauty, greatness, above all inexorability, as it came nearer and nearer to his utmost self. Malaria was God as He was in the Pentateuch, powerful in the utmost, powerful enough to build a world and unmake it, powerful enough to cast down cities with a swipe of His hand, powerful enough to unmake Stephen Maturin with boiling heat in his bones and ice in his blood. Stephen fixed his mind on the _Ave Maria_ with the last thoughts that belonged to him, and after that malaria was all there was.

He lost awareness of much that passed around him: the concerned looks from the men; the captain coming to consult on the matter of his adopted son and drawing back in pity and alarm; one of the kindlier hands coming down to spoon broth into his mouth. Yet he was not entirely insensible, for he was half-aware of the great pain in his head, of the chills that wracked his body, of the angel of death that held his hand.

Visions captured his mind.

_…remarkable how calm the water held him, only about a fathom down now, but sinking quickly, so quickly_. Light striped his vision, teal and cerulean, undulating with the motion of the waves. The blue settled his heart, dulled all emotion. He was sinking, certainly, drowning, perhaps—yet he was not afraid. _I will find my shipmates_.

When he looked straight up through the undulating surface of the water, he fancied he saw the flames of hell, or of the _Hieroglyphe_ , but he felt no fear even then. He was in the sea beneath hell, safe from the fires forever. Stephen smiled. That was how the expression went, wasn’t it? Caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Well, this was the deep blue sea. The Devil himself could not find him here.

The ocean dragged him down, down. The light began to fade--he could not tell if it was the fading of his eyes, or a natural consequence of the water filtering the light out. As the darkness pressed in, the calm was replaced by a yawning nothing of an emotion: equilibrium at its finest. Dark and dark surrounded him, yet he did not feel confined: he had learned the secret, become the darkness, and everything after would not matter anymore.

The ocean ripped his ribcage open at the sternum and he felt nothing. He bled hot blood into the sea, and seawater filled his veins; all perfectly natural, all without a single sensation or start of alarm. Seaweed strangled his limbs; fish nibbled at his clothes, his fingertips, his face. He still felt nothing, as though it was beyond his ability to feel, as though he were an impartial observer or distant god, completely unconcerned with the fate of Stephen Maturin. He was part of the ocean now: sea-changed. Around him nothing but bones, bones, bones. _I am in the company of my shipmates_ , he thought.

Eventually, the fish nibbled his heart away. A sad, black and shriveled thing it was, and he wondered what they might have wanted with it. Yet despite his lack of a heart—he woke, or thought he woke—the angel stayed by him all through that night.

Stephen screwed his eyes tight shut against the light of the moon and the agony in his head, and still the angel of death waited and comforted him. He fancied he spoke to it, once, but it only smiled and brushed a hand across his lips. The angel of death was all dressed in blue, blue like the sea, with a gold crown on her head. She held something like a coal in her hands—black and burnt, but he sensed it lived, contained embers still. If death was indeed at the bottom of the sea, in the company of his shipmates… He smiled and thought that he would not be very sad to go with her.

This time sleeping was like falling into nothingness itself. When he woke the blue woman ( _death_ ) had left his side, and his fever had broken.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, went a little long between updates there! Sorry for the delay! The chapters may be coming a little farther apart now that the school year's started (I'm an 18th grader), but I promise that they will continue coming until you see the words THE END.

They had shot into the Gulf of Aden the day after he fell ill, and in the three days since had passed through Bab el Mandeb, the narrow neck which separated the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, and there paid a very great bribe in gold in order to avoid and inspection and taxation which would have cost more still. Now they were on the Red Sea itself; shallow, dotted with tiny archipelagos in these latitudes, teeming with birds. Here the reefs were quite prodigious, very unusual in their form, and the dhow kept to the deeper channel in the middle of the sea, the arid lands on both sides just barely visible on clear days. Soon the channel widened, and they had only land on their starboard, or easterly, side. Stephen examined the fish brought up for their suppers and found several foreign to his experience; the men looked upon him with consternation when he donned his spectacles and began dissecting one, but said nothing untoward: their respect for him had only gone up since he had rescued the boy, and now instead of their previous easy companionship he found that some of them were treating him with uncertain deference.

Pradeesh was kind enough to explain it to him over their supper that night, which consisted of charred unidentifiable fish, quite delicious, if perhaps tasting a trifle too much like a fish. For as the men, over the course of their long and productive companionship, had generated a kind of argot language amongst themselves, consisting in fragments and words from nearly all of their native tongues, and never spoken the same way twice, so to had they derived an argot spirituality composed of many sailors’ superstitions coupled with the occasional fragment of recognizable religion or folk-custom. As each man maintained fluency in his native tongue, so too did they maintain their own religions as well: there were several devout Mohammadeans on board, for example, who delivered their orisons five times a day in the direction most nearly approximating Mecca, and Pradeesh himself had a small icon of Ganesha as his prized possession. But the spirituality of the group had judged Stephen lucky to escape the malaria with his life, for he had gambled his own soul for the sake of the boy he had saved, and had only narrowly escaped paying the death-price for it.

“They think you were very brave,” Pradeesh intoned solemnly, “but they are a little frightened to be near you, for you stink of the underworld, and there is a _kuei_ upon you. It is nothing personal, you understand, but the _kuei_ are bad business, and as you are not a holy man, you have no power to cast it off.”

“Ah,” said Stephen, “and what may I do, to rid myself of this stink of the underworld, as you call it?”

Pradeesh shrugged. “Men carry it all their lives. Choejor knows a very holy man who could fix you up in a trice, but you would have to go to Tibet to find him. You may be able to find an imam in Aqaba who knows what he’s doing.”

Stephen thanked Pradeesh with some mild puzzlement and went on his way. As near as he could tell, there was no way for him to reassure the crew—they were as superstitious as the English he had sailed with, and that was saying a lot—and so he was forced to accept his newfound distance from them. Even the boy he had saved seemed reluctant to approach, and Stephen was loath to press the matter, except to check the bandages and the splint, and to make sure that the fracture was healing well. This he did with the express consent of the boy’s adoptive father, given with his eyes glowing like coals and fixed upon the boy’s dismayed face, and when he was done the boy let out a hurried, “Thank you for your kindness,” and bolted away like an arrow from a bow.

Without the companionship of his fellows the melancholy pressed in again. He had used up the few scraps of paper onboard, and now with nothing to occupy itself his mind threatened to cast him down from the narrow plank he walked across the pit; for living was like balancing, now, and the more he thought on it the greater his peril.

He was pathetically grateful when at last they arrived in Aqaba, the so-called bride of the Red Sea: a city built out of the ruins of itself, a city that had learned that the secret of immortality was in continual self-cannibalization. It was little more than a fishing village, now, a footnote of the Ottoman Empire, but the fishermen walked to port between the facades of enormous ruins: Roman, certainly, but from other empires the trappings of which Stephen did not immediately recognize. The advantages of putting into such a backwater port were immediately apparent: the dhow was able to anchor in the harbor, offload much of its illicit cargo, and haggle upon a prize with a merchant who had come from Raqqa in a caravan, all without a single appearance from an imperial tax man.

The captain negotiated passage for Stephen with the very same merchant who had purchased the majority of the contents of the dhow’s hold. Stephen had not expected so great a favor from the hard, sour-faced man, but accepted them without protest, the only thanks it was possible for the captain to give for the life of his adopted son. As he made his way carefully down the gangplank, the man bowed deeply to him, and Stephen returned the gesture. They exchanged the customary words, _asallamu alaikom_ , “peace be upon you,” which Stephen thought very neat and fitting: the _pax vobis_ from the Catholic masses of his youth, translated into the language and religion of those a quarter of the way around the world. The long days on deck under the withering sun, intensity only amplified by its reflections on the glittering water all around, had tanned his skin to the point that he could almost pass for a native, as long as nobody glanced his eyes. Even then, they could not be totally sure that he was a foreigner: Aqaba had once been the crossroads of great nations and empires, and a significant fraction of the locals had eyes in green or blue or honey brown, and many had hair that ranged from light brown to blonde, or even, in a few cases, red.

Stephen, with his sun-darkened skin and his naturally black hair, grown long and scraggly over the course of their journey, and his beard, which was still at the patched and wiry phase, and coming in with more gray than black, would not be conspicuously foreign unless he made himself so (conspicuously filthy was another matter entirely). He had been given a spare set of clothes—he did not think upon their origins—when he joined the ship, and it was these that he now wore: a loose-fitting pair of trousers, which he held up with a tied length of rope, and a natural cotton shirt, likewise too large for him. The remaining gold ring he had stowed safely in his new waistband, for later use. He looked, in short, like a poor relation, a disrespectable lout, at the very least down on his luck. No one would bother to rob him, or think too much upon him. Even if the French marched into harbor with a description of him from three months ago, and looked him straight in the face, they would be hard-pressed to make themselves certain of his identity.

Over the course of their caravan journey, Stephen grew still more disreputable in appearance. His hair, already scraggly, grew positively matted, and, under the ferocious influence of the sun, began to take on an almost reddish appearance, with broken ends and dry as a haystack. His lips chapped and then cracked and bled, and still they trudged along. The merchant did not have much in the way of kind words or even food to offer him, but he kept him in enough supply for Stephen to stay alive and walking.  

On the sixth day the malaria-chills hit him again, and try though he did to walk, his trembling limbs would not obey. He pitched down to the earth in a swoon, and found himself lashed to a camel’s back, the merchant muttering complaints up ahead. Stephen, when the second awful period of fever and delirium and sweating had passed, merely thanked his lucky stars that he had not been left to die. The merchant, it seemed, was going to fulfill his promise to the captain to deliver Stephen to Jaffa come hell or high water, and was not going to let a trifling little thing like Stephen becoming incapable of independent locomotion to get in the way of accomplishing this goal. This did not, however, mean that he was going to treat Stephen like anything more than an annoying piece of baggage that occasionally had to be fed.

Eventually Stephen came out of the fever, his limbs very weak, and the merchant looked at him with a baleful eye and recommended that he try the Peruvian bark for his complaint. Stephen thanked him acerbically and asked him if he might have any to spare, the dog, and the merchant blinked, laughed, and admitted that he did not, and from that moment on he was treated a little more kindly, allowed to ride the camel even when he was technically capable of moving his feet (though precious little more than that), and even checked in upon once or twice throughout the day, to make sure that he was not about to expire from heatstroke or gross dehydration. It was better treatment than he expected, but rather than making him feel better, he found himself glowering with profound resentment at the men around him, for their cheerfulness, for the cohesiveness and understanding that obviously lay between them, for the trust they had in one another. By the time they arrived in Jaffa he was glad to be shot of them.

Jaffa was a city more cosmopolitan by far the Aqaba, peopled by an innumerable array of folk from around the Med and around the world. Hebrews, Nestorians, Mamluks, Yemenis, Yazidis, Copts, Kurds, Baibars, Turks: and none of them had any love in their hearts for Napoleon, who had once taken the city, burnt about a quarter of it, and put the surrendering garrison to the sword, then, apparently not satisfied with the already grievous loss of life and property inflicted, had managed, quite by accident, to spread a good deal of plague about as he left. Stephen got the impression that the town was growing fast, or else that a good portion of the population was nomadic, for there were more tents then stone buildings, some gaily colored, some blinding white, some hung with elaborate embroidery. Great walls and towers rose here and there, but they seemed to be under active dismantlement as the city burst its seams. The orange trees were flowering in the streets, and even Stephen, whose mood was as black as ever it had been, could not deny the loveliness of their fragrance, which wafted on every breeze, nor cast any aspersions upon the beauty of their tiny white blossoms.

He paused to consider his options. The latest bout of malaria had been less severe than the first, but it had still incapacitated him. He knew that in such cases the body rarely purged itself completely of the disease naturally; the relapses would continue, likely lasting about a day once every week or two, until he could dose himself with Peruvian bark. But in this part of the world Peruvian bark was prohibitively expensive, and would probably cost him the remainder of his little fortune. This he dearly needed for passage to England.

***

He was still in the city and still in possession of his gold, having not found a captain he trusted enough to throw it away on, five days later, when the chills struck him with renewed intensity. By now he recognized the signs of their coming on well enough: the headache, loss of all appetite, and most of all the very specific malaise, the sense of impending doom, of utter and immediate ruin poised mere inches above his head. He staggered into the shade of an old stone church, meaning to ask for help, but the attack came on so quickly that he did not even manage that. He plunged directly into fevered dreams, and prayed for the mercy of true sleep, until even awareness that he dreamed deserted him, and he beheld his visions as though through waking eyes.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he was in the midst of saying, when he became aware of himself again. He was in the confessional. “I have not stopped Bonaparte.”

The priest—most amused—did he think that Bonaparte was his sole responsibility to defeat?

Parts of the story spilled out, very garbled, for though Stephen knew enough to know that he was not quite in his right mind, he could not for the life of him see his way out. But he did manage to convey Sophie’s utmost danger, his particular abilities in the line of intelligence (he perceived a strange horror in his soul when he heard the words falling from his mouth), his need for Peruvian bark, which he could not fill, for transport to England was necessarily his priority—did they know, were there any ships departing for the western part of the Mediterranean, upon which he might purchase passage?

There was a deep pause on the other side of the screen, and then a scuffle and the creak of a hidden door. Stephen stayed in his side of the confessional, waiting, dreadfully confused. Had he better go? Was the priest about to violate the sanctity of the confessional, was he about to be turned in? Oh, why had he spoken—where was his mind?

He slid open the door to his half of the confessional and staggered out. His limbs were weak and trembling, and he did not think he had eaten in a while. Down the long aisle of the church he dragged himself, past penitents kneeling, past the altars with their candles lit; he took a little holy water, crossed himself, knelt, and felt himself seized by the nape of the neck.

He struggled, but a large hand covered his mouth and nose, and a great weight fell on him from behind. He was crushed to the cold stone floor, and without air the world went gray and heavy, and the dreams came again. The blue woman stood over him, golden light round her crown, and offered him the lump of coal. _Why, that is m_ _y heart_ , he perceived, with very little emotion. _She took my heart_.

 

***

The next thing he knew, bitterness was filling his mouth, so strong it made his eyes water. Within a moment he recognized the taste of boiled Peruvian bark, and forced himself to choke it down. Following the bark came broth, warm and fragrant, made with some kind of chicken stock. This he drank much easier. “ _Gratias tibi ago_ ,” he said, half in a dream, and the bearded monk supporting his head made the sign of the cross.

“You have passed through the valley of the shadow of death,” the Latin-speaker said, or at least, Stephen thought he said. His head was spinning so. “The mark is still upon you. You must rest, and then we will see about England.”

“Mm,” Stephen managed. He was not dead; he was not captured; he would figure out the rest later. Sleep clapped darkness over his eyes, and he did not dream.


	12. Chapter 12

With the help of the miraculous Peruvian remedy Stephen quickly regained his strength. He had always had a stern constitution, and he was on fire to get to England. He learned that it was this fact that had so alarmed and excited the priest to whom he had confessed, for the Catholic Church, outraged at Bonaparte’s treatment of the conquered Pope, was eager to see the Emperor of Europe brought low. They would not accept Stephen's money—would barely accept his most genuine thanks. Their bishop was traveling to Rome, very soon, to a meeting which the bishop of Dublin would also be attending; they realized that Ireland was not quite England, might not be at all the thing, if he did not have contacts there…

“Ireland is perfect for my aims,” Stephen said. He crossed half the Med as the secretary of one bishop, crossed the other half and a small portion of the Atlantic as the aide of another, and arrived in Dublin fresh and eager two months to the day after he had staggered into the great cathedral of Jaffa hardly able to stand. Ireland was not Napoleon’s, but nor was it Britain’s anymore, for there had been three or four nearly-simultaneous revolts, and the situation was chaotic. His heart ached for his homeland, but he was not known there as he once had been, and bad blood from the previous rising remained. The thought of Sophie and the greater prospect of frustrating Napoleon both drove him out of Dublin's familiar streets, onward to England.

He slipped across to Liverpool—as yet, not taken, but the panicky populace judged its fall only a matter of time—and made contact with a certain man there who knew a certain other man. This certain other man’s knowledge of the current sad state of affairs of the English gentry was unparalleled, and he was willing to sell it for a price. Stephen lost five precious days gathering the necessary funds, putting up his gold ring against the rich young dandies displaced from London who spent their nights in social clubs pretending that Napoleon’s armies were not marching steadily closer. His luck, always uncannily good, held, and he soon amassed a good store of money. He lost another two days lying low when a sore loser accused him of cheating and they nearly came to blows over it. He could not afford to be called out, no matter how the insult made his blood boil; the authorities should have no reason to remember his face.

If there was one thing Liverpool had in greater number than displaced people, it was rumors of the world’s ending. Manchester had fallen, York had fallen, Edinburgh had fallen. London was in revolt, it was burning, it was both. The king was dead, the king had fled to Halifax. Famine, cholera, typhus were sure to kill them all, if Napoleon did not put them to the sword first.

Only the last of these did Stephen give any credit to. Disease always ran epidemic in wartime, and the combination of the soaking summer and depredating armies did not bode well for the food supply come winter. All the more reason to get Sophie and the children out before then. It was now mid-October, and the wind blew chill.

When at last he was able to pay the contact, there was a delay of some three or four days before he received a small, handwritten card in the post. There was nothing on the card save a neatly-printed address: an inn in Plymouth, in Devon. Devon: unoccupied country, very far away in the southwest. Stephen had heard rumor that most of what remained of the British Army was slowly retreating along the peninsula, having been bottled up there after the disastrous Battle of Salisbury and an equally ignominious defeat a few weeks later at Bristol. He seemed to recall that Devonport was very near Plymouth, which might explain Sophie’s presence there, for Devonport was an important Royal Navy base, and it would make sense for Navy families to flee there in exigent times. Perhaps there was a whole pack of Navy families there, but the card gave no sign.

A week later he was in Plymouth, having emptied the pockets of half the card-players in Liverpool. Traveling in wartime was always chaotic, but Stephen was well-practiced in the art. One simply learned to expect the unexpected, to say yes to whatever mode of transport happened to be available, no matter how suspect, and to always be prepared to pay large amounts of cash up front. A pair of pistols kept visible, a blade of Damascus steel, and an inhumanly cold stare helped to deter any opportunists. As it was, he passed quite a pleasant time with a father and son in a fishing dinghy down most of the coast, then crossed the moors of the southwest peninsula ahorse.

Plymouth was full to bursting, its usual population having increased by a factor of three or more from the flood of refugees, bottled further and further down the peninsula as the French army advanced. Every day ships departed for Halifax crammed with people fleeing the war. The asking price for tickets had doubled, tripled, quintupled—there were no tickets to be had without personal connections anymore. The crowds made it nearly impossible to find a place to stay the night, but once again ready money won the day, and a flea-infested pallet was found for him in the attic of the Swan and Stars.

Most of the refugees were from London, but, as Stephen had suspected, it seemed half the Navy families in the country were there. Once he was forced to dart into a shop to avoid being seen by Molly Harte. Unlikely she would have recognized him: he had kept the beard, his skin was still tanned dark, and when he put on his clothes from the monastery he looked like a foreigner. Yet he could not take even the slightest chance at being recognized; if word got back to the French intelligence services that Stephen Maturin was still alive, they would stop at nothing until they had run him into the ground. He wondered if they had agents in Plymouth. Certainly it would be a simple enough matter for one to slip in, amidst so many unfamiliar faces…

He paid a runner to deliver a message to Sophie, asking her to meet on a beach half a mile out of town. Although he had left it unsigned, she would recognize his hand. He prayed she would come; he prayed she was not being watched. The possibility was beyond remote—he was growing paranoid—paranoia, the last undoing of so many spies—

He set out for the beach early next morning, half-dreading the news that he must deliver, half-anticipating the joy of seeing a familiar face. Fog had come up in the night, but the autumn wind was already scattering it, letting in the sun in ragged patches. The sea was as yet a gray smudge taking up half the horizon, but he could hear it and smell it, and the thought that it was near steadied him as he picked his way along the path down to the sand.

Sophie was already there, a tall shape in the fog, wrapped in a heavy gray cloak with the hood up. She spotted him, and from the way her body froze he knew she did not recognize him.

“It’s me,” he called. “Sophie, please forgive me for meeting like this, I—“

“Stephen!” She crossed the distance between them in an instant and pulled him into a hard embrace, pulling back almost immediately in shock. “You’re so thin!”

He had thought the same thing, when he’d felt the bones of her arm against his back, and the physician took charge. “I was ill, but I’ve recovered—it’s unimportant. How is your health, Sophie?”

“We were on short common for a little while, but there is food enough for now, and the children are well.”

Stephen’s heart went into his throat, a scene playing out before his eyes: Sophie keeping the children well-fed, starving herself so they could eat.

“I have had no lasting ill-effects,” she said, head held high. “Please, Stephen, do not concern yourself about me.” She paused, her eyes locking on his, and said slowly, cautiously, “Jack isn’t with you.”

Stephen bowed his head, knowing that she knew already—had known it the instant Stephen stepped onto the beach alone; had known, perhaps, since she received the letter in his hand, and not Jack’s. A pang of cowardly relief went through him that he would not have to say the words aloud: _Jack is dead_. “Yes,” he said, the longest utterance he trusted himself with, and she gave an answering sob

He hadn’t wept in the east Indies, not at sea, not at the monastery. At times his whole soul had been shocked into echoing silence; at times he had keep himself hurtling forward just to avoid falling into despair and oblivion. Now at last he had arrived at his destination, and here was Sophie with tears running down her cheeks. He should have wept with her—he should have been able to weep, but that part of him had turned into a fever dream of the angel of death with black coal in her hands.

To give Sophie a measure of privacy he turned away and watched the little waves crawl up the beach and fall back. The fog was breaking up—blue sky above—a lovely day in store. He listened to the birds, the live breeze in his hair, and despite everything he felt almost human again.

"How did it happen?" Sophie said at last, wiping her eyes.

"A powder magazine went up. I am certain he didn't suffer."

Sophie nodded. “There were… rumours.” Stephen remembered the panic of Liverpool, the ratio of untruths to facts a hundred to one, and appreciated how easily Sophie might have clung to the idea that Jack was still alive, contrary to any garbled reports from halfway round the world. “I had hoped—but—well. So many women have lost their husbands in this war. I had thought—I had thought I might be one of the lucky ones. But it’s no use crying. Tears won’t bring him back.”

“Grief is a perfectly healthy reaction, and there is no shame in allowing yourself to feel pain.” Stephen said, perfectly aware that he was becoming the kind of doctor who doesn’t follow his own advice. “Your tears honour him.”

Her mouth quirked down, and he realized he had said something not quite to her taste.

“I’m sorry, I—“

“Don’t be,” she said. “It is—it is difficult to explain, and I know you didn’t mean anything by it. But just once I wish—I wish a man’s wife could be more to the world than someone to weep for him after he is gone. I want to honour Jack with my actions, not just with—with sadness and tears.”

Stephen bowed his head. This was another side to Sophie: the woman who had fallen in love with a man who was gone nine months out of twelve, a reckless man, whose survival had never been guaranteed. Sophie's face was so sweet most of the time it was easy to forget; now, with her cheekbones and brows in sharp relief, it was easier to see that her core was nothing less than steel. “How do we do that?” he asked.

“By continuing to be the people he loved,” Sophie said. “He may not be my husband any longer, but I can still be his wife—I can raise his children, can keep them safe from harm. We have to keep his memory alive in ourselves”--her voice broke, and she took a deep breath--“For as long as we do that, maybe, Jack won’t be—won’t be l-lost. I’m sorry,” she added, with a watery smile, “T-talking about these things like I—like I know anything about them, I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“I think you know a good deal,” said Stephen, his voice hoarse. “And I think I understand.” Sophie had lost her protector and husband; Stephen had lost his dearest companion. And yet she was here still, Jack Aubrey’s wife, and here he was, Jack Aubrey’s friend. That part of Stephen had not died with Jack; could be kept alive as long as Stephen could keep himself alive.

He breathed deep, summoning the steel within himself. The most critical thing now was to keep Sophie and her children alive. Sophie was recovering herself, staring out over the sea. He quickly drew the ring from its hiding-place in his cloak and brought it out. The noise drew Sophie’s attention, and she took a step back, staring at the glitter in the palm of his hand.

“Stephen, I—where did you—what—“

“For the passage to Halifax, for yourself and the children,” he said quickly, realizing what it had looked like. “It is a very fine emerald. You have all the necessary connections in the Navy to make a ship—all you need now is the means to pay. I realize that you may have very little in the way of funds …”

“It is true, we had not thought it possible to get passage,” said Sophie, “but Stephen, surely this is enough for five—that is, surely you would be coming with us?”

“No, my dear,” Stephen said softly. He could not bring himself to look at her. “I must stay.”

“Stay? To fight? Stephen, you are a—you are a doctor! A naturalist! Off to what—to join the militia? You cannot possibly—“

“I am not going to join the militia,” he said, flinching inwardly at how cold his voice sounded. “I have other skills.”

“What are you going to do, sketch them to death?” Sophie snarled, and in that moment she resembled no person on earth more than her cousin, Diana. In an instant her face softened, turned bright red; she clapped one hand over her mouth. “Oh, Stephen, I'm so sorry. I cannot believe I said that. How could you possibly forgive me?”

“As easily as this,” he said at once, and wrapped his arms around her. He had intended only a brief embrace, but the next thing he knew she was sobbing into his shirtfront.

“I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry,” she gasped, “It’s only—to lose Jack, and then to lose you, too—what is the point in throwing your life away?”

“I promise you, I will do all I can to keep myself safe,” Stephen said. As the words left his lips, he realized that he meant every one. For Sophie, for true freedom from tyranny, for the piece of Jack that lived on inside him—he would endeavor to live.

 

* * *

 

 

Watching Sophie's ship recede in the distance, Stephen felt a rending combination of loneliness and triumph. Sophie and the children were safe. It was a small victory in the grand scheme of things—one widow and three children were not likely to turn the course of the war. But their family was one small good thing that Napoleon could not take from the world.

He stared out at the ship until it disappeared between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea, the wind whipping unshed tears from his eyes, a deep, fierce ache in his chest.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't decide if the way this chapter ends is cruel or kind to the reader. But I do know that, if I hadn't ended where I did, it would have been thousands more words and you would have had to wait another three weeks for it.

London in early December: a city half-emptied and half-filled again with soldiers; moonlit, grimy, slick, and ill-feeling. Stephen Maturin crouched near a pile of broken-up wooden crates in an alleyway east of St. Katharine’s docks, gingerly extracting an oilskin-wrapped package from underneath them. He sighed with relief. The dead drop had worked; Sir Joseph’s other agent had once again penetrated the checkpoints around London in time to place the package. In the confines of his mind, he thanked the stranger—with luck, he would never see their face.

The package was larger than he had expected, about the size of two loaves of bread, but concealing it was a moot point: it was after curfew, and illegal for him to be out and about package or not. The penalty for curfew violation ranged from a stern reprimand to death, depending on how charitable the arresting officer felt, and with the city on edge and under martial law charity was not prevalent. Besides, the last three packages had all contained encrypted letters; if he were caught, he would almost certainly be tortured in an attempt to force him to decrypt this one. His very life depended on stealth.

Stephen's lodgings were back in Whitechapel, half an hour’s walk away. Only a few hundred yards to the west loomed the Tower, stuffed with prisoners and malcontents and under heavy guard. Near to the Tower was the only truly difficult portion of his route, but his unknown partner in this endeavor evidently found this alleyway ideal for their purposes—was likely a stevedore or otherwise associated with the St. Katherine’s docks particularly. Stephen waited until a cloud passed over the full moon, dropping cold rain on his head, and slipped eastwards out of the alleyway.

This part of London was one of those impenetrable spiderwebs of paved-over old cowpaths and wagon tracks that so baffled foreigners, but it suited Stephen’s purposes immensely. Dozens of patrolmen stalked this neighborhood, and not one of them had a line of sight greater than fifty feet. He raised the hood of his cloak against the rain and ghosted through the city, senses on high alert.

Halfway to his lodgings disaster struck. The rain had turned into a hard, steady soaker, buildings and streets naught but a dark blur, when out of a sheltered doorway stepped a French patrolman to bar his way.

“ _Qu'est-ce que c'est_?” The man had one hand on the hilt of his sword, both eyes on the package in Stephen’s hands. There was no time to hesitate: Stephen threw the package to the side and, when the guard’s eyes followed it, drew a dagger and slit the man’s throat from ear to ear.

The dark was so complete that it was difficult to discern color, but Stephen could well imagine the puddles and cobblestones turning red. He wiped the dagger on the man’s uniform, shoved him hurriedly back into the doorway so that he might not be spotted by anyone else, and retrieved the package from where he’d thrown it. Rain had beaded up on the oilskin, but it seemed undamaged. He checked the alleyway behind him, then continued on. The cold had settled into him; his mind was utterly clear, his hands steady.

Back at his lodgings he cleaned the blood from his hands, then stripped out of his cloak and shirt, soaped his sleeves, and scrubbed until the blood was gone. The adrenaline was beginning to fade, and his hands shook.

Bundling himself in a blanket against the chill, Stephen unwrapped the package. The reason for its unusual size soon became apparent: it contained a French Army uniform, false papers, and (in an encrypted letter) detailed information on a gathering that was soon to take place at the London residence of none other than Marechal Davout himself. One of Napoleon’s most eminent lackeys. The Emperor himself was expected to attend.

“Sir Joseph, you have outdone yourself,” Stephen whispered. The forgery of the papers was masterful, not a stroke out of place. Of course, it made sense: Sir Joseph Blaine had been highly effective when his operations were conducted abroad; now, with the occupying army in his homeland, he probably had more agents than he knew what to do with. Indeed, Stephen’s role here, if he read the message right, was simply to allow a woman in the back door of the house the day before the party. Other parts would be played by other agents.

The letter also contained effusive thanks for Stephen’s previous contribution to the war effort: the current codebook for the encryptions of the French Army intelligence service, also delivered via dead drop on the docks of St. Katherine. Without it, Blaine said (and, Stephen thought, laying it on a little thick), the current mission would have been impossible. Stephen accepted the tacit acknowledgement that he had twice nearly been exposed and once nearly been shot in the course of procuring the codebook, and turned to the hastily-scribbled postscript of the letter:

_Dover—man near docks inquiring after Irish, English, or Spanish phys Tues last_

_Calais—ditto Fri last  
_

He frowned savagely at the message before burning it by the candle’s flame. It seemed the French intelligence service had not entirely given him up for dead, had even anticipated that he might return to England. The dockyards would be the perfect place for them to resume their search for him, for he could only have arrived by sea. That was disappointing news.

Reassuringly, they were still in search of a physician, and Stephen had lately found work at a kosher butcher shop in Spitalfields Market. Not being a Jew, nor in possession of the proper training, he was not judged spiritually competent to act as _shochet_ , or slaughterer, but the consumption of veins and nerves was also forbidden by religious edict, and one needed no special qualifications to remove these. Usually parts containing them were simply thrown out, but with the great scarcity of meat in London, everyone was desperate to use as much of the animal as possible. There was therefore a great market for someone with the skills and anatomical knowledge to remove them without completely shredding the surrounding beef or veal. Stephen found the work mindlessly simple, and his employers respected his desire to keep to himself.

He could do nothing about the French inquiries for now except hope that they died down—he was already at the very height of vigilance, and he could think of no further precautions he could take save perhaps establishing another bolt-hole or two. He stashed the French uniform and false papers under a floorboard and went to bed.

Sleep did not come. He kept remembering the way the knife felt in his hand when he slit the soldier’s throat. _You are as bad as Jack, with these brown studies_ , he scolded himself. Yet the whole thing seemed so hideously unlike Jack that it almost turned his stomach. Jack didn’t skulk around alleyways at night. Jack didn’t go for the throat and kill before a man knew he was even in danger. Stephen remembered his conversation with Sophie; remembered her desire to honor Jack with her actions. He felt he had not done so tonight. Yet what else was he supposed to have done? He had to stay alive. He and Jack worked in different arenas of war, lived by different rules. It had always been so.

With a sigh, Stephen rolled over and poured out a dose of laudanum. Before London he had not indulged for months; the _Surprise_ ’s stores had been so low by the end of the voyage that he had been required to abstain in case any of the men had need, and of course there was none to hand afterwards. But barely a week back in the capitol and he found himself seemingly without reason at his old apothecary; had heard himself counting out the money, taking the familiar dark glass bottle in hand _. It is only to help me sleep_ , he told himself. He remembered saying that to Jack once, his friend’s worried frown. _Only to help me sleep…_

 

* * *

 

When he came downstairs the next morning two French soldiers were talking to his landlady.

“The bootprints went this way,” one of them was saying, in heavily-accented English. The other glanced at Stephen, took his patrol-mate by the arm. The man looked Stephen up and down, eyes widening.

“Hello there, my good fellow,” he said, with a crocodile grin.

“ ‘e doesn’t speak English very well,” said the landlady, scuttling along behind. “ ‘e’s from someplace south, I forget—“

“Sir, where were you last night?”

“Home,” said Stephen, blearily, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

“And your boots?”

“Also home.” Stephen looked down and noted with laudanum-dulled surprise that his boots were speckled with rust-colored splotches. He remembered—the darkness—blood dyeing puddles red… _blood, splashing as he walked through it, too dark for him to see_ —

“Can you explain why your boots have been splattered with blood?”

“ ‘e works in a butcher shop, don’t ‘e? ‘E was ‘ere all bleedin’ night! I should know, I sleep on the ground floor!”

Stephen detected in his landlady’s response something of the seaman’s _don’t know sir_. She had no idea what her tenant had been doing last night: if he’d been with a whore, or in a gambling den, or actually out murdering people. Nor was she helping out of any affection for him; he was a stranger, a foreigner. No, the source of her intransigence was a simple desire to delay and confuse the French in whatever way she could. If Stephen had been home that night, she would have said he was out; since he had been out, she would say he had been home. _And the entire country is against them like this_ , Stephen thought. Maybe not everyone could fight, but everyone could obfuscate and annoy.

The men rounded on him. “Is this true?”

“I butcher sheeps and cows,” Stephen said. “All day long, I am stepping in blood.” He thanked God for his landlady’s excuse; he doubted he would have thought of it so quickly, with the laudanum still cobwebbing his mind.

“Hnn.” One Frenchmen wrinkled his nose. He and his companion both left. A moment later, Stephen heard them knocking at the door of the next house over. So they were canvassing the neighborhood—so they had not suspected him in particular. He breathed a sigh of relief over his morning coffee. It would not have merited the honor of the word “coffee” under most circumstances, but at least it was piping hot.

“What was that?” he asked the landlady, since he could not very well plausibly know why the Frenchmen had come to visit.

“Some soldier got ‘isself knifed in some back alley last night,” she said conversationally. “You knew that already, though.”

“No,” he said.

She gave him a baleful glare. “Say what you want, I s’pose, but your boots were clean yesterday afternoon.” But then she refilled his coffee, a luxury unheard of, and leaned close to whisper, “I’m bloody glad, in any case.”

 

* * *

 

Stephen appeared, in French uniform, outside Davout’s house at exactly the hour appointed in Sir Joseph’s letter.

“There you are!” another soldier called to him. “You’re the replacement, then?”

“I am,” said Stephen, handing over his counterfeit orders, intuiting Sir Joseph’s hand in this. Other parts, other agents; likely the man he was replacing had been disposed of already. The other soldier barely glanced at his papers.

“Come on, then. We’re to guard the back gate.”

The other man determined with a glance at Stephen’s uniform that he was the superior of the two, and as a consequence was perfectly happy to spend his time lounging against the fence, allowing Stephen to check everyone’s credentials and make sure they were not smuggling in weapons—there had been numerous attempts on Napoleon’s life in London, and security was tight.

Stephen waved through a young woman matching the description in the letter.

Two days later he read in the papers that Davout was dead—poisoned. Doubtless, the article speculated, in a carefully neutral tone, Napoleon had been the intended target. The assassin had not been caught, but all signs pointed to a vast and shadowy conspiracy.

The news should have pleased him. Instead, he felt sick. At the butcher that day his fingers twitched and ached like they hadn’t since Mahon. Hour after hour he extracted nerves from flesh and imagined that he was accomplishing a similar feat in his soul: a deadening, a de-enervation to the pricks of his conscience that cried out that poisoning was not _fair_.

 _You should have thought of that before you became a spy_ , he snarled at himself. But it had been so different—oh, it had been so different at sea, with the deck solid underneath his feet, with the days passing by blue and blue, with a steadfast cheerful friend alongside him, the stress and anxiety of a mission soothed away by the setting, by his surgical work, by the company...

Most days now he could think on Jack without becoming paralyzed by grief. His conversation with Sophie had dulled that particular agony, and now his memories were a source of strength as well as pain. Yet he did not think it would fade away, as some of his previous sorrows had; perversely, he did not entirely wish it to.

As he performed the dull mechanical work he found another metaphor, one inspired by memories of the _Surprise_. His mind wandered back, very far back, to their brief sojourn in the Galapagos, to the flightless cormorants there. Their stumpy, non-functional wings had left him quite perplexed.

“Perhaps they are just out of practice, and purpose doesn’t figure in it,” Jack had suggested, with a half-smile, after Stephen had ranted for a quarter of an hour about the possible purpose of such an appendage. “And speaking of being out of practice…” He drew out his rosin and bow.

Stephen shook himself, back in the present. He knew his own limits, where grief was concerned. Duets were still out of bounds.

The cormorants, though. Maybe Jack had the right of it. Stephen deftly extracted a particularly bizarre venous tangle, then began composing a monograph in the privacy of his own mind.

_Monsieur Lamarck has speculated a good deal upon the origin in creatures of traits they find particularly advantageous for preservation of their respective conditions. He has formulated a “principle of use,” the notion that employing a particular skill enhances the organs involved in accomplishing said skill. For example, the antelope upon the African plain reaches its neck up to nibble upon the leaves of the acacia, and through successive generations of use the neck lengthens until a giraffe stands before us. Thus, the usage of a facility leads to its expansion. Herein I shall present an anecdote from the islands of the Galapagos and endeavour to place it in the context of M. Lamarck’s theories. I believe it showcases its virtues most instructively, yet also shines light on the areas most wanting improvement._

There followed a lengthy (perhaps excessively so) description of the Galapagos, their climate, their extreme isolation from the mainland, their ecology and particularly their curious lack of predators. Then came a particular discussion of cormorants: their habitat, their activities, their anatomy. Then, much the same about the cormorants of the Galapagos, most excitingly their curiously stubby wings and greatly reduced keel. _One may assume_ , the monograph continued, _that, while previously described cormorants make use of their wings for a variety of functions, by far the most relevant of these for their continued survival is to escape the jaws of their predators. The wings seem to be of minimal assistance to the birds in their pursuit of prey, which they accomplish by diving to great depths to fetch fish, propelled by their powerful webbed feet. In the absence of predation, then, the cormorant no longer finds a use for its wings, and they atrophy over the course of generations. This seems a demonstration a corollary of Lamark’s idea: use of a faculty leads to anatomical and physiological changes which enhance the ability to use said faculty, but disuse of a faculty leads to the withering-away of the anatomical specializations which enable it._

_I wonder, were the flightless cormorants of the Galapagos returned to a less hospitable land, would the wings of their chicks grow stronger? Do they retain the seeds of flight within themselves, heritable to their young? Or, is the potential for flight, once lost, lost forever? It seems to me that it must be retained, for if it is gained once, surely it can be gained again. Yet simultaneously one’s mind balks at the task of imagining such an ill-formed and stunted bird taking to wing._

_Furthermore, there is the question of how flight is acquired in the first place. For it is not a quality that admits of gradations, such as Lamarck’s own favourite example of the giraffe with its lengthening neck. Rather, a bird is flighted or flightless. Thus, the use of the faculty of flight is not sufficient to explain the first instance of flight, for a bird cannot use the faculty of flight without first possessing such a faculty. It is simpler to conceive of the offspring of the flightless cormorants one day relearning the skill, for they still possess the physiological facilities necessary for flight, that is to say, wings and a keel; though these are both quite diminished, one might imagine them re-expanding as they became necessary for flight-like activities, for example, gliding, just as the okapi, stretching and stretching its neck, eventually produces young with necks as long as a giraffe’s._

_Yet the question remains: from whence sprung the first wings, the first keel? Any student of anatomy has had cause to note that the wings of a bird, though in superficial appearance quite different from the hands of a human or the paws or a dog, or indeed the flippers of a dolphin, nevertheless resemble them most closely in the skeletal and muscular aspect, possessing in identical number of phalanges, though in the case of the wing and flipper these have become fused together, and in the paw the member most closely resembling the thumb is the dewclaw. Even horses and goats, with their hard hooves, possess the same general limb architecture as all the rest, and so this kinship in physiology suggests a kinship in…._

Stephen broke off at this point, feeling his thinking was growing confused. The word _kinship_ imposed most strongly upon his mind, and yet he did not feel it was particularly what he was suggesting, for _kinship_ carried connotations of a familial relationship; the notion that all of animal-kind was merely a set of more or less related cousins, and this idea, while perhaps appealing to his deeply egalitarian soul, was also plainly fanciful, for once one introduced kinship among all the vertebrate animals, some of them were really not so greatly advanced from crayfish, and indeed, if one made arguments for kinship on the basis of, say, possession of a faculty for sight, rather than from skeletal similarities, it was not at all clear why one could not also extend this kinship to cephalopods or even the nephropidae, and natural philosopher though he was it made his skin shiver to think of such a thing as kinship with the creatures of the deeps (he remembered a nightmare: sinking to the bottom of the sea, surrendering to equilibrium in the company of his shipmates). Too, depending on where one assigned the criterion for kinship, one might call every creature with the faculty for directed movement a member of the family; and this would extend the grouping to the brainless porifera and groping, tubular holothoroida; to the transparent, pulsing, stinging medusozoa and the gaping ostreidae; the dazzling nudibranchia, aglagidae, and asteroidea; definitely to the Anarhichadidae, with their underhanging, toothy jaws and unsettling bulging yellow eyes; and this would simply not do, would it?

Would he admit himself kin to all these creatures under the waves, welcome them as brothers? Such simple creatures, their lives amounting to naught but striving to eat and not to be eaten, battling continually the elements, beset by predators by all sides, without the slightest thought in their minds at all; with no idea of what a good life meant, no idea of caring for one another beyond the meagerest attentions to their own young, the concept of God, benevolent, their creator, so remotely removed from their capacities as to be impossible. Was there anything to redeem such a life? He supposed, perhaps, the fact that they were not aware of their own meanness and smallness, for being so mean and so small; and perhaps, the idea that they could not be at peace, so their lack of peace might have no cause to disturb or disquiet them. War with all was their natural state, and they never would aspire for anything more.

War with all—tyranny and striving and battles and brute contest of the strong over the weak, the quick over the slow, the intelligent over the stupid: this was Napoleon’s law among nations. Stephen supposed it served well enough for beasts, but ironclad in his heart always was the conviction that man could elevate himself above his natural station; could cooperate, could have a culture; could love music, art, family and friends, home, God. Yet no animal could be as wicked as Napoleon, for they hunted when they were hungry and ceased to hunt when they were full: the notion of “conquering” was as foreign to them as the face of the blessed Mary.

And in the face of Napoleon’s tyranny and war—in the face of tyranny and war in general, but Napoleon was the chief author of both of these in Europe, and so he earned the brunt of Stephen’s ire, focused through lenses of bitter experience—many of the small folk of Europe had been reduced to mere animal states themselves, their crops pillaged, their homes burnt and turned over, their livelihoods destroyed. _I got Sophie out_ , Stephen consoled himself. Yet in his heart he knew there were a hundred thousand Sophies, across England, across all Europe. And a hundred thousand Jacks, good men, cut down before their prime.

Strange, strange the springs of emotion, how deep a mystery a man could find in his own heart: he had not wept in the east Indies, nor in Jaffa, nor with Sophie, but he almost wept now, pitying the cormorants tossed upon lonely shores and pitying more their stump-winged descendants, trapped upon distant islands forevermore.

Stephen stopped: he was finished. A quiet word with a butcher’s boy, and the nerveless, veinless meat was taken away.

 

* * *

 

His next two tasks for Sir Joseph were simple courier jobs, transporting packages much like the one he had received from St. Katharine’s docks to far-flung locations elsewhere in the city. But in late January he received another thick bundle for himself containing a new passport, travel papers, official documents. He was to go to Bayonne, far in the south of France, practically in Spain—he was to contact a Spanish agent there.

In Britain the war had ground to a stalemate, with the southeast firmly in Napoleon's hands and the rest of the country stiffly resisting his progress. Spain and Portugal were ostensibly conquered and occupied, but the situation was not as simple as it seemed on paper; the Peninsula countries were both putting up furious if disorganized resistance. The word _guerilla_ (which Stephen struggled to prevent himself from translating as "little war") had even slipped into English parlance to describe the skirmishers who made, it seemed, daily raids upon French positions. It was said that Napoleon referred to the conflict as "the Spanish ulcer"—and, true to the medical metaphor, it threatened to bleed France slowly dry. If the situation grew any more serious, Napoleon might be forced to divert troops to the Peninsula from other stations—stations such as England.

Therefore Sir Joseph, determined to exacerbate Napoleon's bellyache, was sending Stephen to address a _guerilla_ commander's request for English aid in the form of munitions and other _materiel_. If Stephen judged the man trustworthy, reliable, a steady commander of men, the aid might be smuggled from England on one of the small fast cutters the Navy retained. The meeting could be arranged by dead drop at such-and-such location on such-and-such day. Sir Joseph's letter advised extreme caution. No-one in his network had met this _guerilla_ face to face, and it might yet prove to be a trap. _Take care of yourself_ , Sir Joseph had closed the letter.

In Bayonne, relishing the warm honest sun on his skin, seeing the tall houses shoulder-to-shoulder on the canal. Finding a hotel off the main road, watching the dead drop location from a café for three hours before determining that no-one else was surveying it. Retrieving a message that specified a time and a place for the meeting.

Late afternoon at the docks, eerily quiet. Two ships were anchored, enough for a crowd of cheerful shoregoing sailors taking their liberty, but there were only about a third as many as Stephen might have expected. A full dozen guards were stationed and various points along the pier, a sight that made him uneasy in the extreme. It was conceivable, he supposed, that their captains had chosen to deny the men their liberty due to some gross misbehavior or disgrace in port—

An arm thrown over his shoulders cut off the thought—half-panicking, he moved to throw his assailant off only to discover that she was a prostitute. “ _Non_ ,” he said firmly, “ _je n—“_

She whispered Spanish in his ear. “ _Take me back to your lodgings_.”

God help him, this was his contact: hair cropped all short, one tooth missing, smelling strongly of sweat.

The guards laughed lewdly and even applauded a little as he walked off with her. She plastered herself against his side, dust-caked skirts scraping the cobblestones. When he ordered dinner to be brought up to his room—thank the Lord, he had not been able to afford anything like a reputable inn—she tore into the chicken leg like a starved dog.

 _Poor creature_ , Stephen thought, _if all the guerillas are like this, it is plain why they need supply._

When she had stripped every last morsel of chicken off the bone she dabbed her mouth delicately and said, “What’s the passphrase?”

“We haven’t got a passphrase.”

“Too right.” She gestured to the other chicken thigh. “Are you going to eat that?”

Through mouthfuls of food and gulps of wine she said, “My skirts got ruined walking from the mountains and I didn’t have time for anything else, so I kohled up my eyes and _viola!_ ”

“Very good,” said Stephen, taking a small helping of rice for himself before it was all gone, “and I suppose that, sadly, you have hit on one of the few ways a young woman and an old man can meet in public and retreat in privacy together without attracting suspicion."

"You're not _that_ old," she said, rolling her eyes. "Do you have our guns?"

Stephen frowned. "I assume you are a messenger for the _guerilla_ commander?"

"I am the _guerilla_ commander," she said, holding out a greasy hand. "Agustina Raimunda María Saragossa Domènech, at your service. Do I detect a hint of Catalan in your speech, sir?"

Stephen felt his pulse accelerate. Was this a French agent, sent to ferret him out? "Do I detect it in yours?"

She smiled innocently. "Only wondering if you might be acquainted with that old fox, d’Ullastret. Last I heard from him he was giving them merry hell outside Barca."

Stephen shrugged and lied. "I cannot say I've made his acquaintance, but any enemy of Napoleon's is a friend of mine."

"Would your employers be more inclined to supply him than me? Because he has military experience, and because he is a man?"

"I did not say you would not be supplied," Stephen said, "but the fact remains that the English Navy would be running a risk to help you. We must know before we send the guns that they will be put to good use."

"To _good use_!" Agustina gave an inarticulate cry of fury, whipping a dagger from her skirts. She dropped her voice to a furious whisper. "The last time we attacked a patrol we had to close to bayonet range to fight because _we had no powder!_ I have killed more men with this dagger than I have with my gun because I lack the ability to fire it! If we could pick them off at a distance we could easily be twice as effective with less loss of life and here you sit and talk about _good use_?"

"Tell me more about these engagements," Stephen said. He felt she was telling the truth, felt the French would never have sent such an unlikely personage to sabotage his mission. Still, his task was to vet her and her soldiers for Sir Joseph, and he intended to accomplish it.

The conversation lasted nearly five hours and another two meals, and by the end of it they were both exhausted, she annoyed with his continual repetition, he satisfied at last that she was not deceiving him. The same contact that had delivered her initial plea to Sir Joseph would send his favorable report, and Stephen dashed off a few totally innocuous lines they had agreed would stand for his approval of the arms shipment to be sent in the ordinary post. A more detailed report, to add flesh to his account and be delivered to Sir Joseph slightly more directly, would have to await his return to England; it was far too risky to send a long encrypted message in the international post, where it might easily fall into the hands of one of the French intelligence services.

"Well, my dear," Stephen said, removing his spectacles, "if the Navy is able, you will have your guns within the month."

Her face broke into a grin, and she kissed him on both cheeks in thanks.

"You must return to your comrades now," said Stephen, completely unmoved. "It would not do for you to be traveling at night, though you may have one of my pistols and all the powder I can spare at the moment."

"Oh, I am staying with family in the city for tonight," said Agustina, waving a hand in dismissal. "I only thought... well, do you like fights?" The last four words came out in a rush of embarrassed, self-conscious excitement, as though saying them faster would lessen his astonishment at hearing them.

"Do I like fights?" Stephen repeated incredulously. "What sort of fights?"

"You know, where two men punch each other until one can't stand to be punched anymore and they put money on it. In fact, _I've_ got money on it."

"A prizefighting match? Mary, give me strength."

Agustina blushed scarlet. "Forget about it. I'll go by myself. It is only that I did not want to go to the docks unchaperoned looking like this, but I suppose if you are going to be—"

Stephen heaved a sigh. "I will accompany you." Sir Joseph would have been deeply disappointed if Stephen's next report read, _promising guerilla captain murdered in the dockyards because I failed to see to her safety_.

She gave a demure smile. "Well, how kind of you to offer."

 

* * *

 

The fighting pit was not even at the docks, but under them, being illegal. Authority did not object to the men killing and beating one another they did not object to in _sensu stricto_ , but they all took rather strong offense at the notion of good quality fighting men being taken out of commission for the sake of a wager-taker's greed. The space under the docks reeked of damp, the sand firm and wet underfoot.

Inside—if indeed "inside" was the proper word, for it was under the timbers of the shipyard, yet the walls consisted mostly of stacked palettes and miscellaneous shipping debris—the press and heat of bodies almost overwhelmed him, after so long alone in his freezing London rooms.

Agustina slipped between two burly men just in front of him, and he slipped through after, throwing an elbow in what he hoped looked like an accidental manner in order to get through. She did not notice his struggles; her eyes were fixed on the cleared area some fifteen feet in front of them. There was no raised platform for the fight—the ceiling of timbers above their heads hung too low for that—and so the best view belonged to the tallest man. Agustina was determined to watch, but also substantially shorter than even Stephen, so she had to squirm through the crowd like an eel in order to have a chance at even half a glance of the action.

Stephen froze. That was... surely that could not be Bonden, laughing and joking on the other side of the ring? He was missing a tooth, the upper left canine... possible scurvy, which could cause such things, but no, his gums appeared largely intact, not at all recessing the way a scurvy-sufferer's would... perhaps it had been knocked out...and there was a curious tattoo, a solid blue anchor, on the left side of his neck.

He shook himself. No, this could not be Bonden. Bonden and all the others had been aboard the ship across the harbor when it exploded. He had to stop deluding himself, had to stop living Stephen Maturin's life. Maturin's life had ended with the loss of his friends and his country; the world had changed and he would change for it, would shed his wings, and he could not allow his grief to alter his reason. Bonden was dead.

But it did look so like him...

The man who looked so like Bonden seemed to feel eyes upon himself. He looked up, directly at Stephen, and for a moment their eyes met across the crowd. Stephen felt a jolt of recognition, tore his eyes away, heart racing as though he had just run a mile _. It cannot be_ _Bonden_ , he told himself again. _It cannot be him._

When he glanced back up, the man who was not Bonden was looking at him quizzically. All his instincts told him to flee, but he could not leave Agustina here alone—

His appearance, he knew, was much altered from the Royal Navy physician Bonden had known. He forced himself upright, summoning a cool look, and returned not-Bonden's gaze with a haughty glance of his own: one that dismissed and forbade.

The stranger dropped his eyes.

Agustina appeared in front of him, tugging at his hand. "Come on, it's starting!" She practically had to shout; the din had grown as the crowd swelled behind them. A drum sounded, once, twice, and the noise of the crowd lessened by several orders of magnitude.

"Gentlemen," boomed a voice. "It is my pleasure, tonight, to introduce—“

Stephen lurched as Agustina dragged him several steps closer to the pit. For the first time, he was able to see the floor of the ring and not just the gap in the crowd that signified its existence. The space was miniscule, maybe only about twelve feet in diameter, and there was no wall to separate the combatants from the crowd. It would be a brave man who stood in the front row. He and Agustina were still several men separated from the fight, but he did not like the situation at all. If one of them leaned back to dodge a punch, the crowd was so tight that the motion might propagate like a wave. With this many people in one place, the chances of a stampede, of serious injury—

The announcer was talking a good deal of stuff about the returning champion, a massive brute of a man who had "no tongue and no heart." Nobody could say where the man was from, the announcer said—perhaps Siberia, perhaps Samoa, perhaps the jungles of Asia where the women had faces on their hands and tongues like snakes'. Though the man had a truly impressive physiognomy, Stephen did not at first sight rate him as much of a fighter. He held himself heavily in the deep sand, and any man of his weight would doubtless be slow. The announcer called him "Beast," and more beast than man he seemed, with a great thick carpet of hair and a wild beard on his face. Stephen wondered if he was about to watch the Beast squash some poor man's head to a pulp, or if the organizers of the events tried to make things a little less one-sided. Surely, surely, if this were a betting game...

"Agustina," he said, into her ear, "what odds are they giving tonight? Do you know?"

"Twenty to one on the Beast. My money's on Lucky Jack, though."

"Lu—"

The announcer's tone shifted, and Stephen halted himself in enough time to hear, "—and his opponent this evening, Lucky Jack!"

Stephen's heart went into violent palpitations. He gulped air to calm himself. There was more than one man named Jack in the world. Doubtless one man out of a dozen might choose to nickname himself lucky. Ergo, there would be dozens of Lucky Jacks—hundreds—this one could not be...

A tall man, broad across the shoulders, barrel-chested, stepped out of the crowd, dusting his hands lightly. His head had been shaved recently, yellow bristles only just beginning to show. Sun and wind had carved lines deep into his face and tanned it dark, further drawing attention to the blue of his eyes, making the tracework of scars that crossed his bare chest stand out. And there was that tattoo again, a blue anchor on his neck. With his savage expression, he looked like a man from another age: a berserker, or a gladiator.

Stephen's heart steadied at last, for here was the question resolved. He would know those scars anywhere. Even though the man had dropped four stone since Stephen had seen him last, it was him unquestionably.

 _Lucky indeed_ , he thought, gazing in wonder upon Jack Aubrey's face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, Agustina is a real person. She's legendarily cool and you should look her up :) No word on if she really liked prizefights, though.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was tweaking this chapter, and tweaking it, and generally procrastinating the final moment when I suck it up and hit the "post" button, when lo, a shining light appeared, and it was geniusbee's incredible art of Stephen and Sophie in Chapter 12!   
> http://geniusbee.tumblr.com/post/132518967747/im-trying-to-remember-how-to-draw-and-practicing
> 
> And so, after freaking out about how wonderful her art was (you guys, if you ever wanted to know how I picture Stephen, THAT IS IT) for what felt like an hour straight, I did a final-pass edit on this chapter and posted it. Thank you so much to all of you out there for sticking with me on this long haul :)

Such a profusion of emotions—like the very foundations of the Earth had shifted—Stephen scarce knew how to breathe, how to stand, how to be human for a moment. The press of strangers held him upright until strength flowed back into his knees. Jack, alive. Jack, about to fight—Jack, in danger—it could hardly be borne, like so many other things in his life, and yet, like so many other things, he bore it all the same. His heart was open and flying, singing with joy, and yet his stomach was sick with nausea; he had not thought himself capable of such unreasoning fear since Jack had died, had thought himself beyond the reach of such depth of the emotion forever. It was Jack who opened up these gaping faults within him, and yet, by God, he would not have wished them closed, not for the world.

Stephen looked upon the Beast with new eyes, tempered by fear. Jack’s opponent was six and a half feet tall if he was an inch, bearing on seventeen stone, and yet the outlines of his muscles were visible in many places, cushioned by fat. He would be slow, but likely be able to stand a great many blows.

“What are the rules of the engagement?” he asked Agustina. “Do they fight until one of them cries mercy?”

Agustina looked at him incomprehending. “They fight until the fight is over."

Stephen tried another tack. “Well, yes, but—when is the fight over?”

Agustina shrugged. “When it’s been a good fight, I s’pose. Or one of them drops.”

Stephen resisted the urge to grind his teeth together as he asked, “What sorts of injuries have you seen, in the course of your coming here?”

Agustina tilted her head to one side. “I haven't been here much in the last couple months, since we've been keeping to the hills for the most part. Worst I’ve seen is a broken leg. But they say they’ve had men killed before. Not on purpose, but if someone gets a hard blow to the head. And last week—I missed last week, but I heard it secondhand—last week, this big man—the bigger man, I mean, the Beast—they say he shattered a man’s jaw.”

“Lord have mercy,” said Stephen, nausea intensifying. He gathered his scattered, flickering thoughts. "The odds are twenty to one, you said? Why did you put your money on… on Lucky Jack?"

Agustina shrugged. "They were parading him out a bit before you got here. I liked the look of his eyes."

Stephen pinched his nose. "You put money on him because you thought his eyes were pretty?" Not that he would necessarily dispute the point—but it seemed irrelevant in this situation.

"No!" Agustina looked offended. "I put money on him because I thought he looked brave. A man does not get so many scars being a coward, and he does not survive so many wounds being weak. And his eyes seemed more… more alive, somehow, than most of the pressed men. So I thought, he is experienced; he is brave; he is fierce, maybe the chance is worth two franks."

The drum sounded—the fight began.

The Beast moved forward at once, seeking to gain the advantage at the outset and never let it go. He was faster than Stephen had expected, more misfortune, and he moved confidently despite the sand under his feet; evidently he was used to fighting under these conditions. Jack, by contrast, did not dodge out of the way until the last possible moment. Stephen’s heart went straight into his mouth and stayed there, in danger of being joined by the contents of his stomach, for the remainder of the fight.

Jack’s slowness concerned him greatly; his friend had a great many faults, but indecisiveness in times of danger could never be considered one of them. There were two more very close shaves in quick succession, the Beast’s bearlike paws clipping Jack’s ear on one occasion, on the next just barely whistling over his bristling golden hair. On this second swing Jack made a very neat sidestep, one that was almost like the man Stephen used to know, and landed a heavy blow to Beast’s left ribcage, knuckles angled just so. But the Beast's great bulk, and wealth of fat, seemed to protect him, for he barely grunted, pivoted, and smashed his right fist up in a furious uppercut which Jack only just managed to turn aside, off balance and stumbling back with all speed.

If the Beast had been a little faster he could have ended it then and there, but it was not to be; the crowd booed and hissed at Jack as he circled backwards round the ring.

“This is no good,” Agustina groused, “it is not a fight at all if the one man only runs away. The Beast will have him soon—see, he is already tired."

Oh, how Stephen wished her words to be untrue, and yet he could see very plainly her evidence. Jack’s face shone even in the limited light, and his breath was coming in pants that Stephen could hear over the crowd; Agustina had brought them in very close, the bloodthirsty dear. Stephen wondered what on earth it was that had induced him to accept the match.

“Agustina,” he whispered, “why would a man make a fight of it, so hopelessly outmatched?”

She spared him one baleful glance before turning back to the match. “It is not as though he has a choice in the matter—the captains make them do it. I imagine Lucky Jack's captain is about somewhere.”

“ _Make_ them—" Once again, Stephen swallowed his rage. "I beg your pardon, Jack's _captain_ —"

“Oh, they are not destroyed completely so very often, only a little torn up and beat about. And it is not very often the good seamen they send, in any case, unless they are very sure they will win without disaster," said Agustina, completely misinterpreting the reason for his disbelief. "Mostly it is insubordinates and the like; I have heard that they use it instead of the lash, just to keep down anyone who is getting a little too big for his boots.”

Jack, too big for his boots: Stephen could believe that.

Now the crowd began to boo in earnest, for Jack was still ducking and dodging, avoiding blows for the most part, as the Beast patiently pursued him around the ring. Jack had made one or two more attempts at getting a blow in, but the Beast’s hide had proved too thick so far.

The Beast moved in, closing the distance between them. Something was different this time, Stephen knew, though he could not have said what, and it seemed Agustina agreed with him, her fingernails digging into his arm. His heart thudded double quick, filled with foreboding, a dark anticipation of grief.

But when the Beast’s great fist came thundering out, Jack ducked underneath. His fist flashed up, landing a solid uppercut square on the man’s chin; Stephen heard teeth clack together. The giant’s head snapped back, and he staggered. For a moment, Stephen thought he would fall to the sand, but no, the dog-- he stood still, panting, eyes bulging from his head.

Then it seemed something in Jack changed, and he moved like another man: joyful and fully alive, blue eyes blazing with unnameable fury. He was a tiger, animal instinct in motion. If the Beast had not gotten his guard up again it would have been a bloody and quick ending to the fight; as it was, his upraised hands were pummeled like a sack of flour hung out for boxing practice, one blow after another raining upon them, the occasional hook breaking through the line, the press not lessening until the Beast pivoted on his back foot and snapped a leg up, kicking Jack straight in the stomach and sending him flying back into the crowd. The men caught him with a collective cry of excitement, shoving him back into the fray, and if Jack had not had the good sense to hurl himself to the ground instantly he would have caught the follow-up blow, a devastating right, straight in the head.

“Is that even allowed?” Stephen whispered frantically to Agustina.

“Everything is allowed! But the Beast, he prefers not to kick most times. And all you Englishmen fight with your fists. But I saw a Chinese man fight once and _he_ could kick like a whirlwind—”

Jack very creditably turned the dive into something approximating a roll, but in the thick sand it was not so acrobatic as it might have been, and the Beast dove down into the sand over him, driving a knee into his back and closing one great arm across his neck in a deadly hold. Stephen cried out in dismay with the rest of the crowd as the arm descended, but abruptly the Beast’s head snapped back, and there was Jack rising, tooth marks in his elbow, a wild grin playing across his face. The Beast was on his feet again almost as quickly, but both men were quite staggered, Jack with his hand on his back just over the right kidney, the Beast nearly punch drunk.

As Stephen watched Jack the blaze retreated from his eyes, his grin flickering out, and he became a mere man once more. Stephen well recognized the look of stifled pain that lay in the lines across his forehead, the pinched set of his mouth. Indeed, Jack’s hurt must have been severe, for he did not take advantage of his opponent’s disorientation, but merely stood gasping, looking almost lost, as though he did not understand why he stood in this ring, with curses being hurled at him from all sides. 

It happened very suddenly: the Beast moved; Jack was caught flat-footed and unprepared, and the huge man landed a sickening body blow, following it up quickly with a straight punch to the face. Jack crumpled to the ground, and the man kicked him again. Blood from Jack’s mouth splattered the sand. Stephen craned his neck to see, standing on tiptoe and bobbing up and down, unconscious of how ridiculous he appeared.

“Lift me up!” Agustina cried in his ear. “Lift me up, I can’t see—“

She was cut off by a sharp pop and a hideous bellow from the ring; Stephen's eyes found an opening just in time to see the face of the Beast, distorted by pain, as his whole body crashed to the earth like a felled oak. Then Jack staggered upright, blood streaming down his face, dripping from his chin, painted along his cheek sideways and splattered with sand from when he had fallen. His nose was broken, and he was heaving breaths in through his open mouth, teeth grotesquely stained and striped with blood.

Yet he was standing, fire and joy and bloodlust writ across his face, the Beast whimpering upon the ground. Stephen recalled the popping sound that had come just before the giant fell, and realized it for what it was: the sound of the tendons of the knee giving way.

“Well, gentlemen,” Jack said in English, struggling to stanch the flow blood from his nose with one hand while gesturing to the crowd with the other, “I do believe I’ve earned a little cash.”

“Cash?” Stephen translated at a whisper, trusting once again that Agustina would know what was afoot.

“Tips,” she answered at once. “Of course the purse goes to the captain, but it seems unfair that the fighters win nothing at all. It is customary to give coins, if they have fought well.”

The crowd, it seemed, did not agree with the proposition that Jack had fought well, for no coins were forthcoming. In fact, one of the men spat at Jack’s feet. The mood was ugly, deeply ugly. Jack had felled their champion, the man most all of them had laid their money on, and what’s more, he had done it in the moment when they had been most confident in their victory. The bookkeepers were paying out to the few who had bet on Lucky Jack, not too begrudgingly, for they were few in number, and through the crowd Stephen caught a glimpse of a French stripling in a captain's uniform with an undeniable smirk. Agustina swarmed away with her chit and returned with a grin, barely concealed, upon her face.

“Net profit thirty eight franks!” she whispered, face flushed with delight. "I think I will give some to Lucky Jack. After all, he's the one who—"

"Lucky Jack's ship," Stephen interrupted, "what is its name?"

“He is on the _Fraternite_ , as you would know, if you had bothered paying the announcer man any attention at all.”

“Where does the captain of the _Fraternite_ stay while he is in town?”

"I don't know," Agustina said, and Stephen's heart fell. But it lifted instantly when she added, "My relatives—the ones I'm staying with—they'll probably know. I can find out and tell you tomorrow morning at your hotel, if that would suit. Why are you so interested in Lucky Jack? Is he another spy?"

Stephen laughed aloud at the thought. His heart was light, so light; he felt like he was soaring. "No, no, he is not spy. When you give him the money, tell him he is not to overtax himself in the next week, and to bind up his ribs as best he can, and to get himself some good red meat. And say it in French, for I doubt he will understand Spanish.”

Her eyebrows drew together in puzzlement, but she went, squirming gamely through the crowd and pulling Jack momentarily from a concerned-looking Bonden and... was that Killick? With his pigtail shorn, oh, dear… Stephen tore his eyes away. Something like a hysterical laugh or a scream was swelling in his chest, and staring at his old shipmates could only increase the pressure.

Jack was taken aback, first by Agustina's appearance, then by the two franks—a princely reward, to be sure—and then lastly by her message. Stephen watched through the corner of his eye as Jack’s generous, bloodstained face bloomed into first a grin, and then a look of profoundest bafflement. Then some flash of intuition came to him, and Stephen ducked behind another man just as Jack’s eyes snapped up, scanning the crowd. Thought Stephen could not catch Jack’s words over the general din, he could practically read the man’s lips after knowing him so long: “Qui vois a envoye?” _Who sent you?_ Jack seized Agustina by the elbow.

Jack would never hurt a woman, but Agustina did not know this. She squirmed mightily and, when that did not dislodge him, bit his hand and dropped down to knee height, scrambling away as nimble as a spider, soon invisible to Jack among the press of legs. Jack raised his hand, incredulous, as Stephen ducked down, issuing instructions. “Can you meet me outside, where the docks meet the road? He must not see you with me.”

Agustina nodded and scampered off at once. Stephen allowed himself one last look over his shoulder. Bonden had taken Jack’s arm and was gently leading him off. Jack moved slowly, clearly in pain. Stephen’s heart bade him to throw off his false identity at once and go to his friend and help him, but at the very thought, he was gripped by shattering fear: fear that if he gave himself way now, the two of them would be snapped up and hanged in half an instant.

He could not go to Jack—he could not leave him. A nonsensical thought, for Jack was already gone. He forced down the contradictory impulses boiling inside him, locking them off as best he could. He could not make a mistake now—could not throw away this last miraculous opportunity for the sake of these damnable emotions. He would bide his time. He had waited so long—what was a little more waiting?

_I have waited long enough_ , a voice inside him snarled. He met Agustina outside as they had planned, then parted ways at her relatives' house, scarce able to focus long enough to say a proper goodbye. He stalked back to the inn in furious impatience with himself. Jack was alive—Jack was hurt—Jack had need—Stephen should return to the docks, should go to him—

_You must stay_. His reason would not allow him to perform an action so criminally stupid as to return to the docks, but his heart demanded otherwise as he paced his cramped and solitary room. Jack had stood not twenty feet from him, bleeding and in pain, and he, Stephen, had done _nothing_. He could have wept from frustration, but his eyes stayed resolutely dry of tears. He was going to act the idiot—he was going to the docks and damn the consequences if he did not prevent himself. In a furious raw red terror at what he might do he seized the tincture of laudanum he had brought along— _just to help me sleep_ —in one fist, taking a swallow and relishing it—bitter, bitter.

Too quickly for the drug to be entirely responsible, his furious energy deserted him, and he collapsed on the bed as suddenly as a man kicked in the stomach. There his emotions warped to something less painful and infinitely less real, until the room rocked gently as a ship at sea and the shadows yawned open and a woman came to him wearing blue.

The angel: the angel of Death, who had held his hand. He could hear his own heart beating slow. He sat up, leaning forward, seeking a glance at the angel’s face; at the time of his illness it had ever been hid in shadow. At the same time, he wondered abstractly about his sanity, for he had always thought the angel a piece of fever-delirium, a conjuration of sweat and fear. He checked his forehead. Quite cool.

She turned toward him then, reaching out a hand and brushing it across his face like a mother’s blessing. “Fear not,” she said, with a gentle smile, “All is well.”

Her skin was darker than was common in Spain, more Egyptian or Levantine than Moorish, if he made his guess. Black hair curled rich and dark to her shoulders, and her eyes were dark amber. She had a motherly face, though quite young, and dimpled, and she wore a blue shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

“ _Marededéu_ ,” Stephen whispered: _mother of God_. “I—I mistook you for someone else.”

She only smiled.

“What would you have me do?” he asked. The grit of the day still clung to him, but he did not feel self-conscious. He trusted Mary utterly, in all dimensions; she could see him at his worst and yet love him more than he deserved at his best—Mother of God, most merciful in all the worlds.

“My dear, I would not have you do anything,” she said. “Now you know. Your friend has been returned to you.”

“He has. I am filled with joy.”

“Not joy only.”

A bad taste in his mouth. “I do not understand.” He cleared his throat, realizing it was useless to dissemble. "I beg your pardon. What I mean to say is, I do not understand myself. I do not know what I should do."

Maria’s eyes found his unerringly in the dark. “The choice is yours, my dear. If you would, I can help you understand it more clearly. Yet I fear I will hurt you.”

“Nothing would honor me more than your aid," Stephen said instantly. "And hurts can be healed.”

A falling ring of laughter. “And you are a physician, yes! Usurper of mothers,” she teased. “Do you consent?”

“With all my heart, Blessed One."

She would have loved him just the same either way: Stephen knew that. Yet he thought he detected approval in her eyes as she brushed her hand over his forehead.

He had not intended it, but in that moment terror bubbled up inside him, and he found himself leaning into the shelter of her touch. He bit back a whimper as a vision of the future hit: Jack, strung up from a yardarm, tongue protruding, face purpling, limbs hanging like a broken puppet’s.

“You fear you will lose him,” Mary whispered urgently. “That is why you did not approach him tonight. You fear your actions will bring him to harm; you fear that your identity will be discovered, and Jack will be punished for his association with you. Because you cannot bear to cause him pain, you withdraw. Losing him broke you. You cannot stand another blow. And so you tell yourself that by interfering you only stand to lose what you most treasure. Better for him to live out his life without you there then die with you at his side, yes?”

“Yes,” Stephen said—this, his furious tangle of feelings, laid out neatly in words, no less painful for that.

“Jack is less safe now than you were in London, and more miserable. I say this not in the interest of hurting you—though I am sure this does hurt you—but to make you understand.”

“But the fight—tonight, he seemed—“

“Happy? He fought like a man willing to die. That is the only joy for him now: pure animal striving. You are two different men, and you mourn in different ways, but mourn he does.”

As she spoke, she filled his mind with more visions. Jack, his face white as bone, eyes raking the burnt-out wreckage of the _Fantastique_. Jack, dressed as a common sailor, speaking with man after man, asking for news—a physician, a Spanish physician, an Irish physician, a naturalist, a man of learning, a cellist, did anyone know? had anyone seen? Ports across the world, sailors of all nations, all shaking their heads. Jack, throwing himself into hard physical labor, relishing the exhaustion that followed him wherever he went, loving more than anything the moment when he threw himself into battle, when the slow dull ache that followed him everywhere seemed, for a moment, to fade. Jack, still in the habit, after all these years, of thinking, _what a clever-looking bird, I must tell Stephen; what a sweet melody, Stephen and I must improvise upon it; what a bad break, but Stephen will set it right_ —and then breaking off the thought as it tore open old wounds.

Stephen felt a horrible kinship for the man: were these very thoughts not the same reason he had found himself incapable of practicing medicine? Was unable, still, to hear the sound of a violin without heartbreak welling up in his throat? Could not so much as catch sight of sails on the distance without being dragged under an ocean of memory?

“Do you see?” Maria said, taking his hand gently. “You would not hurt Jack for the world. But what hurts him most is to be apart from you, just as what hurts you most is to be apart from him. If you respect the depth of that which you share, then you will understand: you cannot walk away.”

Stephen opened his mouth, tried to speak, failed. His eyes welled up with tears, and he squeezed them shut, drawing his arms in and hiding his face. Maria’s hand slid easily up his arm to rest upon his shoulder, squeezed it comfortingly as he choked out: “My heart—I lost it first of all, deep under the sea, in the blackness, after—“

“Ah, as for that,”—Stephen heard a shuffling noise—“I am afraid I must apologize. It was in danger of being lost, and I could not risk such a heart. I took it from you, and now I return it, having kept it just as it was.” The hand on his shoulder moved to the back of his neck, gripping gently. “If you would lean back…”

Stephen obeyed, untangling his arms and bracing them against the bed. His eyes found Maria’s. She was holding something in her hand, like a coal softly glowing. “Close your eyes,” she said, and he obeyed. A moment later, he felt a delightful sensation just behind his sternum, like he had swallowed a cup of hot coffee, and could still fill its warmth inside him.

“There,” she said seriously. “You are as good as new, or at least you will be soon.”

“I must thank you. How can I ever repay—“

“Most of all, keep the hope alive within yourself. Do not let it go out.”

Stephen bowed his head at the gentle rebuke. “After this? There is hope for every man, if there is hope for me.” He looked up, but Maria had vanished, leaving only the faint scent of sandalwood. _I will not sleep an instant this night_ , he thought, until he perceived, very faintly, the feeling of a thick blanket over himself, the heaviness and looseness to his limbs, and above all the slow warm throb of his heart, and realized he was already dreaming.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the last chapter was for geniusbee, this one is for justincase and Orockthro! Your comments give me life!
> 
>  
> 
> WE HAVE A JACK CHAPTER I REPEAT A JACK CHAPTER THIS IS NOT A DRILL

Jack ground his teeth: no money at all from these damnable tight-fisted spectators. That meant they would have nothing with which to bribe the harbormaster and therefore no lead on whether Maturin had passed through Bayonne. The sole outcome of the beating he had received would the enrichment of his captain and captor. Shoulders sagging, he abandoned the ring at last.

"Hell and death, you had us worried there, sir," said Bonden. Killick, ever the steward, handed Jack his neatly-folded shirt.

"I admit I was a trifle concerned myself for a moment or two," Jack said, pulling the shirt over his head. "I shall have to win a little faster next time. More to the point, I—what's this?"

A girl, barely five feet tall, with short hair and kohled eyes, was tugging at his elbow. Before he could speak she pressed two francs into his numb hands. It was an exorbitant amount of money, to a pressed man, and Jack's face broke into a grin of its own accord, though his thoroughly-abused nose protested. Two franks would be more than enough for the harbormaster—if he could only light along tonight, before he would be missed aboard the _Fraternite_. "Thankee, miss," he said, "But what—"

She interrupted him, speaking in Spanish-accented French. "Get some rest. Bind up the ribs if you can. What was the other thing? Damn, I have forgotten. No, I recall. You are to eat red meat."

"Red… meat?" Jack repeated, baffled. That sounded like something Stephen would—would—

In hope, against all probability, he scanned the crowd, seeking his friend's face, but in the dimness under the docks, amid the press of bodies, it was difficult to make out even Killick a few feet away. “ _Qui vois a envoye?_ ” he asked her; his French having improved of necessity a good deal in the past year. Without quite realizing it he seized her arm, and her reaction was as swift as it was violent. He was left staring bemusedly at the teeth marks in his hand while Bonden howled with laughter. Jack gently cuffed his arm in exasperation, stifling a flinch as it jarred his injured ribs and stomach.

"Easy there—" Bonden said, grin dropping, but Jack was already craning his neck, using his height—if Stephen was here—

"Red meat, did you hear her? Red meat!" Jack bawled out, to the confusion of all within earshot. He clenched the two coins tight, edges digging into the flesh of his palm. Realizing he was on making a scene, he dropped his voice and hissed to Bonden, "Do you not smoke it, that is something Maturin would say—"

Bonden's eyes widened. "Sir—before the fight—I saw a man who looked very much like him—"

Killick let out an incredulous high whine; Jack was more articulate. "Damn you, Barrett Bonden, you had the Doctor in your sights and you did not call out to him?"

"I couldn't be sure it was him!" Bonden's voice cracked in vehement protest. "He had longer hair than I have ever seen him with, and a week's growth of beard, and his face was thinner..."

"Damn it, man, first you say it looked like him, then you describe a man that sounds nothing like! What made you think it was him?"

"The eyes," Bonden said at once. "Begging your pardon, sir, but the Doctor has a look would freeze a man's blood, when he pleases." Jack understood in an instant, having had his own blood frozen many a time. "Just such a look, right through me"—he thumped a hand against his sternum—"so I could not say, first, if it _was_ him, and second, if he was inclined to speak with us at all."

Jack rocked back on his heels, dumbfounded. Stephen did not want to speak with him, or the other Surprises? The press of the crowd—the anonymity—the darkness—it would be the perfect place to pass a message in person unseen—so why had he not come?

Jack opened his hand and turned the two franks over, examining them minutely for markings or other clues. He found none; they were quite ordinary franks. Or the message itself—red meat, was Stephen alluding to a place? A butcher's shop, or cattle-yard? Why had he not also specified a time? "What are you saying, Maturin?" he asked the coins in frustration.

"Which the captain's gone round the twist," he heard Killick muttering, "one knock too many 'e's had, and poor Killick left to mop up—"

Jack decided that if Stephen had meant to send a message he would have made it a good deal less ambiguous, knowing Jack. He handed one frank to Bonden and keeping the other for himself. "We shall make inquiries. There is no point in seeing the harbor master, if we know Stephen is here already. We shall have to ask at the inns to see if someone matching his description is there. God help us if he has let rooms from some family; we will never find him."

"Sir—" Bonden looked as though he might protest, but despite the fact that they were both now rated the equivalent of Able Seaman, he could never entirely rid himself of the habit of obedience to Jack, and so if now this obedience required the encouragement of a truly forbidding glare, it nevertheless was persistent enough that he broke off a question about whether Jack, injured, was fit to be skulking about Bayonne all night.

"You take the street north, I shall take south. Killick, you will keep watch for the patrols at the docks and signal to us when an opening presents itself for our return to the ship."

Killick greeted these instructions with a stream of reflexive invective of unusual venom; clearly he did not approve of Jack's plan. He concluded with, "which you'd better go now, seein' as the lad's busy flashing out with the coin you earned 'im."

Jack glanced over at Captain Forfait, whom the old Surprises, to a man, referred to as "the lad" whenever he was out of earshot. He was, indeed, consulting a timepiece he had bought with winnings from Jack's previous match with the faintly wistful air of a man who wishes dearly to be complimented on his new timepiece, and his lieutenants, it seemed, were missing their cue, too involved in some petty dispute with the bookkeeper. All were distracted: the perfect opportunity to slip away. He nodded once to Bonden, once to Killick, and turned south. His heart pounded in his throat, _pom pom pom pom_ , a disreputable rushing beat that reminded him of old tunes he thought he’d forgotten.

 

* * *

 

Inn after inn Jack watched his money dwindle with nothing to show for it. He received only frightened looks at his dreadful appearance, the annoyance of innkeepers at being woken in the middle of the night, and mockery for his dreadful accent. And then at last, simple disaster: a sharp-eyed woman spotted the blue anchor despite the concealment offered by his rumpled collar. She raised the alarm about a prisoner escape, and in a trice Jack was hauled back to the _Fraternite_ in manacles.

"Have you anything to say for yourself?" said Captain Forfait, once the guards were gone, peevish at having been woken to face two stern harbor marines with one of his prisoner-sailors pinioned between them. He was in an extravagantly embroidered nightgown, hair spiky and disorderly from bed; Jack's shirt, by contrast, was torn, threadbare, and splattered with blood. At least Bonden was not here; Jack hoped he had fared better in his quest for intelligence.

"Only that I have earned you a pretty penny tonight, and that what a man does with his own frank's winnings is his own business," Jack said, having already decided he would rather distract Forfait by provoking him a little than give away the truth. His head pounded with exhaustion and with the beating he had taken, and French did not come easy to him, but Forfait spoke no English and would not have given him the courtesy even if he had.

"And what business was that, exactly?" Forfait asked.

"Well, sir, I regret very much having to explain it, but I was off to see a whore."

"Hm. A very particular whore, you were seeking, then, to stop at so many inns, eh? An Irish whore, perhaps?" Forfait asked, scanning the guard's report.

Jack stiffened. The guards must have spoken with the innkeeper afterwards—must know what he had asked. How much had the innkeeper remembered—how well had the guards done their jobs? Had he just, in attempting to find Stephen, exposed him to their enemies?

"You like that red hair, then, do you? Rare, in this part of the world, but not unheard of. Tell me, Captain, was your wife red-haired?"

The word _Captain_ was a deliberate taunt, and Jack knew it, but his blood rose all the same. "If it please you, Captain," he said, struggling to keep his voice deferential, knowing that it could mean the difference between life and death, "she is not." A moment later, he realized Forfait had not got the whole story—that "Irish" may have been his only clue if he did not also have "black-haired."

"Oh, a lover, then?"

Jack could think of no other way out than to say, "That is about it, sir."

"A man?" Forfait exclaimed in startled delight.

Jack blinked. "I beg your pardon, sir?"

Forfait brandished the piece of paper. "It says here you were asking about a man. Irish, with long hair and a beard. So, you took a red-haired Irish dog for a lover once? Is that about right?"

Jack was completely tongue-tied. He knew Forfait was toying with him, but he could not escape the situation. Either he could contradict Forfait's scandalous story—probably deliberately scandalous, to provoke vehement denial—and be forced to then concoct something plausible on the spot, or he could accept it, and likely be hanged for a sodomite. He flushed deep red in his confusion, his difficulties compounded by his and the French language's mutual antagonism. At his first, spluttering attempt at a sentence Forfait burst out laughing, slapping the paper on his knee.

"Oh, I cannot believe it! That is too much. Our famous old English 'sea salt'—that is the expression, is it not?—dreaming after his long-lost Irish lover. Tell me, did you ever have a man hanged for sodomy, in the Royal Navy?"

"Not personally," said Jack, tight-lipped.

"Well, all the same, that is a tale I shall enjoy telling to the gunroom and make no mistake. Good lord, they say every man has his tastes, but an Englishman and an Irishman! What did you talk about? How much you enjoyed subjugating his country?"

Jack felt himself turning even redder with mortification, but knew that at least Forfait was no closer to discovering Stephen, and it seemed he had a liberal attitude towards Jack's imagined crime. Far, far better to be ridiculed than to be hanged, but Jack felt a flash of temper, and breathed deep to calm himself. No matter how familiar Forfait grew with him, no matter how he japed and teased, Jack could never dare check him; he had seen men strung up on the grating and lashed to death for disrespect. Such practice had been far from unknown in the Royal Navy, and so Jack knew exactly how carefully he must tread if he wanted to stay alive.

It was dangerous to even ask Forfait for a dismissal, if he was not finished, but Jack felt one coming, and sure enough, the captain waved him off as soon as his gales of laughter subsided. Jack rose, forcing himself not to put a hand to the throbbing bruise on his back. It would not do to show weakness—ever, but especially not now.

"Oh, and Aubrey?"

Jack turned, one hand on the doorknob.

"I cannot have you using our prize-fights to take your liberty of the harbor. You did, as you say, win me a good deal of money tonight, and in the hopes that you continue to do so in the future I will not have you hanged, but such behavior is never to be tolerated. You will receive fifty lashes Saturday morning."

"Yes, sir."

Another dismissive wave, and Jack hurried out just as a midshipman scurried in under his arm. It was dawning Thursday morning: they would weigh anchor Friday, bound for the West Indies. In any event Jack did not have long to wait before he was flogged.

"Sir," the midshipman said, "Lieutenant Rincon wishes me to inform you he has found a barber-surgeon, a Prussian, very down on his luck, in town—he says, if you were to offer—"

Jack hurried away, mindful of the danger of being caught eavesdropping. Still, it was good news: their previous barber-surgeon had expired of yellow jack in Saint-Domingue. The men would be pleased, although Jack felt no such emotion. It always took him so after a lead on Maturin came to naught—a few days of curiously muted emotion, the grey aftermath of disappointed hope. 

Disappointed hope, for Bonden had uncovered no news of Maturin at all, and seemed less certain by the minute that he had even seen him at the scene of the fight. Jack found himself questioning if advice to eat red meat was not so very commonplace, after all. Many men other than the doctor could have given such advice. Maybe Jack was fabricating a ghost for himself to chase, so he would not give into the despair that was so natural to men of their station; maybe Maturin had escaped the _Fantastique_ only to be drowned or smashed upon the cliffs—maybe he really was gone. They had searched so long with no sign—if only he could have a sign, now—

Before they went to work Bonden and some of the other Surprises insisted on putting their heads together to remember how the Doctor had bound up ribs, and applied a very passable (to Jack’s unpracticed eyes) approximation of the proper bandaging. Jack was deeply touched at their concern, let them know so, and deeply touched at this further evidence of their reverence for Stephen: Stephen, who, it seemed, would continue healing Jack’s wounds even when he was... was away. Still, down to the careful layering of the bandages, it was the Doctor’s work: and if Bonden had been lining up the cloth, and Killick muttering ferociously as he tied it up, well, that just meant the hands that did the Doctor’s work were a little more far-removed from him than usual, and as Jack slipped into to sleep that night, he was able to trick himself into the thought _how lucky I am, that Stephen is here_.

They slipped anchor on Friday, having brought the Prussian aboard. Jack's hopes had stirred at the news that the man had fallen off the dock and been complete soaked, but were almost immediately dashed: the man was two inches too tall, for one, with copper-brown hair much teased in the latest style, and he had side-whiskers and a mustache. His arm was in a sling and he wore thick spectacles, which both detracted from his appearance, but overall there was still something altogether too presentable about him to be Stephen.

The barber-surgeon nevertheless endeared himself to the pressed men almost immediately; his very first action aboard ship was to enter into a furious argument with the captain over the suitability of whipping men already wounded. It seemed that the surgeon had caught sight of Jack's battered face and other bruises, wondered aloud if they might be treated, and informed that he had just as well wait another day and treat the whip-weals as well. His flurry of indignant words only ceased when Forfait, quite audibly, declared that if it did not, they were still close enough to Bayonne to turn the barber-surgeon back on shore. The harangue cut short instantly and a short while later the sharp clip of the surgeon’s heels on deck signified his return to his cabin.

Saturday came. Jack bore the strokes in determined stillness, teeth resolutely clapped together, as the whip fell, and fell, and fell. He passed into a kind of haze, soupy and impenetrable, and his mind only managed to put itself back in right order in the surgeon’s cabin. Good Lord, usually men did not take fifty strokes quite so badly. Then again, usually they had not been beaten the day before. Jack's head swam. For quite some moments now he had fancied he heard Stephen’s voice, very quietly reassuring him that all would be well, and a wave of cold pain, quite independent from his physical predicament, passed through him.

“Jack? Jack, it’s me.” The old familiar touch, first to his wrist, pause thirty seconds, then to his forehead, pause ten.

It felt quite veridical, Jack declared, nodding with satisfaction. “Most veridical indeed.”

An amused curl came to the surgeon’s voice—oh, but it sounded so like Stephen’s, hardly Prussian at all—and it said, soft as the hand on his forehead, “My dear, what can you possibly mean?”

Hot emotion choked Jack’s throat. “Oh, I am being damnably sentimental. I beg you forgive me—I am quite out of my senses. Your pardon, sir.” He stared very deliberately at the planks of the floor (for he lay upon his stomach, the bleeding mess of his back facing up) willing the tears to subside from his eyes.

The gentle touch against his forehead again, and the voice so uncannily like Stephen’s said, “No, Jack, it is I who must beg your pardon. Stephen Maturin begs your forgiveness.”

Jack’s shifted his gaze, unbelieving, to the face of the doctor who was now kneeling beside his cot. The man had removed his spectacles, revealing the curious paleness of his eyes. He did not say anything, but his face concealed powerful emotion, the muscles in his neck and jaw clenched, breath coming fast. At the shock of meeting the doctor’s eyes, every nerve in Jack’s body sang with recognition. He heaved in one breath and abruptly a gray mist came over his whole awareness, a curious ringing in his ears.

The hand stroked his forehead, another coming forward to clasp his hand, and quiet reassurances flowed around him. Stephen—this was Stephen before him, this was Stephen here, holding his hand, this was Stephen, murmuring little kindnesses into his hair as the ringing subsided. “…easy, joy, lie there easy, all is well, oh, I am so sorry, I tried to stop—I could not think of a better way to tell you…”

“Sorry,” Jack managed to gasp out, “ _Sorry_? Stephen, you are here! How can you be sorry?” Stephen's face lit up like it might have for a sighting of a particularly rare and unusual bird, the familiar expression made strange by his differently-colored and styled hair. A laugh bubbled out of Jack's chest. “That mustache, that haircut. They should be the most transparent disguise in the world, and yet they have made quite an ass of me.” He laughed again, and abruptly the tears in his eyes overspilled, running hot down his face. He was not ashamed at all to weep in front of Stephen, especially not on such a joyous occasion. Stephen held his hands through the episode entire, his face moving from joy to sharp grief as he beheld the effect he had caused.

With difficulty, Jack mastered himself. “Oh, I am sorry, Stephen, but I am so happy to see you again. How in God's name did you find me?”

"It is a long tale, very long, and a strange one. I am glad to see you as well, more glad than I can say. But now you must sleep, Jack. Sleep, and we will speak more when you wake. Here, I have prepared a draught.”

Jack drank it obediently, allowing the doctor to support his head. He recognized the telltale alcoholic whiff of laudanum almost immediately. “Be here,” he managed to mumble, his eyes already falling closed. “Be here when…”

“I will, Jack.” Stephen's voice was thick with emotion as his hand gripped Jack's tighter. “I will.”

A distressing notion occurred to him, even as the fog of laudanum rose: "Stephen—you, coming aboard—you risked your life, your freedom, for what? Just to be here, with me?"

"Oh, soul," Stephen said, his voice breaking, "of course I did."


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, darlings. This chapter was an emotional ride for many reasons, and it's certainly not what you would call a stellar example of dramatic structure. But... sometimes characters just need to TALK to each other, you know? I kept Jack and Stephen apart for so long, I think I owed them that.

“It is time to change your bandages,” Stephen said the next morning, putting on his sternest face, but Jack broke into a grin, and it was very hard to maintain a stern countenance in the face of such an expression. “Lay still, Jack, for all love. I saw you had bound your ribs earlier—most creditable work."

“Ha, you are too kind. That is Bonden and Killick and the rest of the Sophies and Surprises and all the other old hands. Between the two dozen of them they have had four sets of ribs bound by you. And it is no wonder that they recalled the proper knots, you know. We are well-practiced at that sort of thing, in the Navy.”

“You should tell them how well they did,” Stephen said, after a thorough evaluation.

“May I tell them who says so? It will mean so very much to them, Doctor, to know you are alive and with us.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot yet say that I am with you, much as that grieves me. I have infiltrated the officers of the ship, and my position is by no means secure. I believe you may have some notion of my falling out with the captain…”

Jack smirked; the lower decks had been speaking of very little else. The doctor and the captain were clearly set against one another, but the first lieutenant seemed more inclined in the doctor’s direction, though he could do nothing overtly without scuppering his own career and prospects for promotion.

“Now, last night at supper in the gunroom Captain Forfait told an extraordinary tale," Stephen said.

"Oh, Lord," Jack said, face going beet red. "Please do not be offended—I was forced to allow him to believe some… some rather, er, irregular—"

Stephen raised an eyebrow. "Is it really so irregular as all that?" At Jack's expression of stupefaction, he sighed and continued, "Only one point needed clarification."

"Just, er, just the one?"

"How were you recaptured? What were the means by which the innkeeper identified you? Surely she did not know you by your face alone."

Jack looked upon Stephen with amazement. “What a fellow you are, Stephen. Surely you are not… that is, you do not need me to explain…”

“I would not ask to toy with you, Jack," Stephen said, somewhat brusquely.

“Well, you will forgive me if I do not shift to show you the tattoo, for it is underneath me right now and I’m not in much of a mind to move, but surely you have noted it on the other men?”

“The blue anchor, inked on the left side of the neck? Yes, and I saw it on you when you were fighting the Beast, but it rather slipped my mind at the time. What does it signify?”

“Well,” hedged Jack, making steady eye contact with a knothole in the floor, “I suppose rightly it signifies that we are pressed men, and property of the French Empire.”

His words were greeted by a shocked silence. Stephen brought out the spectacles, wiped them off on a handkerchief, and very deliberately put them back on before saying, “You mean to tell me that you are slaves?”

“I wish you would not say it like that, Stephen. It is embarrassing.” Jack’s face, already flushed, grew even redder.

“Embarrassing!” Stephen burst out. Immediately he remembered himself, and his whisper buzzed like a wasp in Jack’s ear as he said, “You have nothing, nothing to be ashamed of, Jack Aubrey, nor any of the men—you are being abused most hideously—cannot believe—even Napoleon, to sink so low, oh, I would not believe it, not of any man but him—there is no depth to which he cannot sink—Emperor, my eye, he is nothing but the grossest, meanest, foulest, twistedest, ugliest, vilest little dog to ever blot the face of this fine world with his existence.”

“Goodness, Stephen. Is that all?" Jack’s heart was eased, much eased, by his friend’s furious indignation on his behalf, but the sense of creeping shame remained under all of it. He had never been much of an abolitionist in the past, but if he ever got free he could never be anything but, for having experienced the merest taste of what slavery entailed he found that the institution disgusted him to his very core, and that this disgust spilled over to everything even remotely touching upon the topic, which necessarily included Jack himself.

He had thought at first that he and the men might overcome their oppressors by force, but all the weapons were kept with the officers at all times, except during boarding actions, and the officers went about their everyday tasks heavily armed, as though anticipating a challenge. Then for a while he had thought to rush them anyway, and very likely be shot and killed, if only to give the other men a chance to break free, but he had not yet fallen so out of love with life as to take this suicidal course. Then he made himself very low, for all the laws of his upbringing and the life he had lived dictated that he should rather die than be a slave, and yet here he was, alive still, allowing these horrid little men to dictate his every movement.

He felt sick down in the very pit of his stomach that he was not fighting harder: but the fight was impossible, the only outcome certain death, and he was not willing to face death, not yet. Did that not make him the vilest type of coward? And if Napoleon was indeed a vile dog and all those other things, then what did that make Jack, the slave to one of Napoleon’s merest servants?

These thoughts were not fully articulated in his mind, but swirled below his awareness, and were the source of the stinging shame he felt, to be here before Stephen more or less in once piece, with the anchor tattooed to his neck advertising the shackles that mean little men had clapped around his soul. He felt he had allowed himself to be beaten, that he was somehow complicit in his own degradation. He screwed his eyes shut, that Stephen would not see his tears, for these were a different type of tears altogether, ones that he could not face his dearest friend with.

“Jack,” Stephen whispered, his voice fierce and urgent and close, for he was kneeling right by Jack’s ear. “Jack, no. Do not weep. I would say you are worth a hundred of these men, but I count most of them as being negative worth, and the mathematics do not cooperate.”

This earned him the ghost of a grin, half-hidden by the cot.

“Jack, you must understand that there is no diminishment in my respect and regard for you due to your current misfortune.”

“Damn it all, Stephen, I know that, but it is blasted difficult to feel. You cannot understand how… how… how very… it is damned difficult to express!”

There was a very active pause, in which Jack could practically hear Stephen thinking, and then the doctor said, very softly, “Did you think the less of me, after Mahon?”

Jack started up so quickly to deny it that he tore open one of the wounds on his back. With a grunt of pain, he gingerly lowered himself back to the cot as Stephen clucked disapprovingly, dabbing away the blood that leaked out. “No,” Jack said vehemently, not bothering even to whisper, as Stephen checked to be sure that nothing else was amiss with his wounds. “No, damn it all, and the two cases--they are not the same.”

Stephen merely pursed his lips, looking at Jack over his spectacles, busy with the wound. “I cleaned your wounds yesterday, but I must repeat the operation with the deeper lacerations,” he said, as though their conversation had not taken place at all, as though Jack were still captain, and Stephen his doctor, and all right with the world. “Nor am I satisfied with the ship’s water—it has slime growing over the top of it, which is very likely insalubrious. It will be ethanol or none, but I will be alacrity itself.”

“Thankee, Stephen,” said Jack automatically.

“Did you, though? Truly?” Stephen’s voice was barely a rasp.

“Stephen,” Jack gasped, as his back became one stinging matt of fire, “I admit I am a little slow at the moment, but I cannot understand a word you are saying. Did I what?”

“Did you think less of me, after Mahon? Is that why you are refusing to consider the two cases in parallel—why you so quickly denied it—is that what it is, that you considered us both degraded, our human dignity lost, by the circumstances inflicted upon us against our will—“ Stephen’s whisper had grown agitated, and entered a register more hospitable to a dog’s ears than a human’s; high emotion showed on his face, pink blotches burning high on his cheekbones, on his forehead, on his neck and ears.

“Lord, no! I denied thinking less of you after Mahon so quickly because the answer was so damned obvious! By God, Stephen, do you really think me such a scrub, that I could think less of my friend, after he has been hurt in the service of my country? Those wounds—Stephen, if anything, I was _proud_ of your endurance, though filled with utter regret” (he had almost let slip the fatal word _pity_ ) “that you ever had to suffer so much, and terrifying hatred for whoever dared harm a human being so.”

“So it is the dimension of service to country that ameliorates it, then?” Stephen pounced. “If I really had been out bird-watching when I was taken, instead of genuinely copying down the scheme of the entire harbor, would you still have thought my wounds honorable? Or would you have felt contempt for me, as you now feel contempt for yourself?”

“Why, what a ridiculous question. No, if they had caught you actually bird-watching, it would have been all the more tragic for being a complete waste and a misunderstanding, but I would never have held you in contempt.”

“What if it were not the French at all who chose to torture me? What if I had been waylaid by highwaymen and used just as cruelly? Would you suddenly have said, ‘Oh, the fool, he deserves his wounds,’ and left me to my suffering?”

Jack was taken aback by the ferocity of Stephen’s questioning as well as by his continued referral to the events which, so far, he had never yet chosen to discuss. Mahon was something they had both tried to pretend had never happened; something in Stephen, whether pride or the sheer weight of trauma, had prevented him from speaking of it. Until this day, as he wielded it against Jack like a weapon—nay, like a scalpel, sharp and probing, seeking to cut out the lesion that lay in his heart.

“Never in life, Stephen. If you had been waylaid by highwaymen it would have been the same story as before. I would never turn away from you, were you in such straits, and that is the truth. And I would never say you deserved such treatment. I dare say no one deserves to be tor—that. Well, maybe a vanishing small number, among the whole human population: only the very worst, in all of history.”

Stephen’s whole demeanor now shifted as he sat back in his chair like a country lawyer. “Two key points I wish to draw out from those sentiments, my dear, and we will see if I have expressed your views correctly. First, you believe there are some treatments, such as the torture which I experienced upon Mahon, which are an affront to human dignity itself, which no man can ever deserve to endure.”

“Yes, I suppose that is a fair way of putting it. Excepting he is the wickedest of all men, perhaps.”

“Second,” Stephen continued, “in such cases, of actions of surpassing brutality and inhumanity—and I use these terms very loosely, for in truth a brute or beast would never be capable of such artful, deliberate cruelty as a human being—the victim of the action is the proper object of support, of friendship, and if necessary, of aid, offered in the spirit of fellowship, equality, and respect. Never of mockery, further degradation, contempt, or any of these things. For if someone has been treated like less than a human being—like they did not deserve to live, or breathe the free air, or attempt determine for themselves the objects of their own strivings—then the response should not be to, as the phrase goes, kick them while they are down. And if they have been treated as less than human, that does not take their humanity away—does not make them a proper object for scorn. The scorn should be reserved for the villains, not for the victims.”

“Well,” Jack said, mulling these many words over in his head, “I reckon you have the right of it about who is to blame. But this piece about… about trying to make someone less than a human… is that really what they are about?”

“Jack, in Mahon they beat me until I could not breathe without pain. They put me on the rack and they cranked until I could not move a single joint in my body. They kept me awake until I barely knew my own name. They threatened… oh, all sorts of things, things you would not believe if I told you. But the worst of it was when they pissed on me, and spat on me, and would not even speak to me, and spoke among themselves as though I were an object, their toy to play with. For that is what they were doing, do you see? They were making me into their toy, a body alone, a thing less than a human.”

“They could never succeed,” Jack corrected, severely, blinking away the tears that had come sudden to his eyes. “You were every inch a man throughout the entire event, and that is what makes it so sickening.”

“That is my point exactly, Jack. Now these men are trying to do the same to you. That is why you feel so low: because they are treating you like a man would treat a dog, not like an equal before God, worthy of respect. You are ashamed, that they are abusing you—you feel that somehow you must deserve such treatment. Yet I survived something very like; and you never once thought I deserved such a thing."

Jack shook his head, wordlessly; he did not trust his own voice.

"You knew, in my case if not your own, that desert does not figure into such matters, not with these men who enslave and burn and torture. The fault is in their rotten souls, not in yours. You are not one ounce less, because a man has tried to make you less. Whether you fight him or whether you cannot, or whether you choose not to for whatever reasons you have, the fault is still with him. And if at the end of the day he wins, and you lose, the fault is still with him. And if he sleeps sound as a shepherd at night, and you are the one plagued with nightmares, the fault is still with him. And even if no man lifts a finger to help you, even if all condemn you, and praise the one who harmed you, and he gets medals and gold and lives a long happy life serving his country and his God, and you die alone and forgotten in some back room, or at sea, the fault is still with him. Even if he destroys you utterly, you did no wrong, and he was the wrong. And God will sort him out, in the end, even if in this world you are unavenged.”

Stephen pulled up short, for Jack was weeping, utterly silently, into the pillow. He laid a hand on Jack’s shoulder and then, dissatisfied with that, began gently rubbing up and down the man’s arm in a soothing circle.

“Lord, Stephen,” Jack said, after a moment, “It amazes me sometimes, how you can be so learned on the one hand, and so wise on the other.”

“Are they not supposed to go together?” asked Stephen, with an ironical quirk of his lips. “And yet I suppose you are entirely within your rights, for they so seldom do. But that was not wisdom sprung new from my forehead, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Rather, it is what I had to cobble together after Mahon to prevent the experience from eating me alive.”

“I thank you for sharing it with me, then. From the bottom of my heart.”

Jack stopped for a long moment, and then continued, in a growl low like a bear’s. “You would not have been unforgotten, Stephen. And I guarantee you would not have been unavenged.”

Stephen sniffed, the emotion he had held back throughout his entire tirade straining at last to the surface. “I am sure you would still have sent those men straight to hell by the most direct route. And I am glad that I did not have to wait upon Judgment Day to see justice done, in that case.”

“It is a damned long time to wait, is it not?” Jack chuckled softly. “Yet many must wait that long, poor souls. I am beginning to wonder if that is how long we will have to wait for old Boney, or if some enterprising young lad will chase him out a window for us all.”

Stephen sniffed again, this time with mock disapproval. “A window… no. Let us show him how civilized we can be. Let us put him on trial for the rape of Europe, and hang him like a common criminal. And then I shall buy his body for sixpence, and open up his brain, and see if we can find the source of his malignancy.”

“Hmm,” Jack sighed, a soft smile coming to his face. “I like that plan…”

Stephen continued to stroke Jack’s arm, not saying anything. After a while, his patient dropped off to sleep. Stephen stayed, but presently he heard the sounds of the hands being piped to dinner, and knew that he would soon be expected in the gunroom. Still, he lingered for a minute, steadying his nerves, preparing himself once again to don an identity that now seemed utterly alien to him. The man in Bayonne had been a blasted shadow of a human being, perfect for slipping on another face. But he felt utterly certain of himself now; it was as though telling Jack his true name had restored him to his true self. To resume the disguise now… it would be difficult. He would be dead if he failed.

 _Only a little longer_ , he told himself. _Only a little longer, and you can be Stephen Maturin again._

 

* * *

 

 

Jack woke with a pained gasp in the middle of the night, the abused muscles along his back spasming and drawing the flayed skin. Stephen came awake himself and padded to Jack’s side. There was nothing he could do save administer laudanum, but with Jack's damaged ribs he was in fear of administering such a potent antitussive for too long; the injury could progress to pneumonia if Jack was not allowed to cough naturally. An attenuated dose only: that would be safe.

Still, Jack was made sleepy and loquacious by the fifteen drops he received, and Stephen hoped that he might be far away enough from reality that he did not perceive the pain as being a part of him.

“But Stephen, I am in great anxiety to hear your story. How on earth did you survive the sinking of the _Fantastique_? By all the accounts we were able to make out there were a good two score of men who drowned outright, and another score who perished in the fires on deck even before she went down. And we knew that you had been a prisoner aboard, and when you did not reappear after that night everyone assumed that in the chaos of the fire, you had been quite forgotten there, and that you had gone down with the ship.”

Stephen swallowed; this was not something he had looked forward with particular warmth to discussing with Jack even when the man was sober, much less when he was impaired. He said as much, but Jack grew fractious and bad-tempered, and even attempted to move, which threatened to open his wounds. Finally in order to quiet him Stephen said, “Yes, that is precisely what I wanted you to think; or, rather, that is what I wanted the world to think, and unfortunately I had no way of getting a private signal to you. Indeed, I did not see the need to send a private signal, for I was likewise convinced that you had been killed aboard the _Hieroglyphe_ along with _Surprise_ ’s entire crew. Yet it seems obvious that I was mistaken on both accounts.”

“You were indeed, Stephen, dreadfully mistaken. _Hieroglyphe_ ’s water casks sprang a leak the day after you were separated from the rest of us. They could hold enough for her crew—barely—but not for a whole gaggle of prisoners. We were transferred in irons aboard the _Marechal_ , Christy-Palliere’s ship, just before he was knocked on the head. The voyage back was very tight, and I do not think I should like to describe it to you in much detail, for you know very well how prison-ships can get; the man chained next to me died as we were rounding the Cape, and they did not pull his body out for another week.”

Jack fell silent for a moment before visibly recomposing himself. “And what about you, Stephen? What filled up your time?”

“I found a dhow bound for Turkey and then made a lucky friend in the Church to get to Ireland. I traveled to England via Belfast. And I traveled down to Portsmouth, where the Army was bottled up, and I met Sophie there, and Jack—Jack, I told her you were dead.” The words burst out of him in a torrent, horror at what he had done rising up inside him. “And I got her and the children on a transport to Halifax, which transpired to be the last that left. I do not know what happened to it. Oh, Jack, I am so sorry.”

“It—it does not signify terribly, does it, if we cannot get free somehow?” said Jack, in a horribly strangled voice. “It is not as though I am much of a husband for her here. In fact I suppose it might be better for her. But I am pleased to hear that she and the children are safe. I had worried for them terribly—there are such awful stories, especially about the wives of those in the Navy, or the Army… And as far as I know all of the transports got through, or at least, I never heard of us taking any of them.”

Stephen breathed a sigh of relief, remembering how his heart had pounded in his throat as he sent Sophie off into the cold waves. “That is very good to hear.”

“And after you sent her off, then what?”

“I traveled to London and found work at a butcher's shop and in... other areas. I suppose I accomplished a few things in my—my particular line, but when I look back on that time, much of it is a wet, gray blankness.”

“You were lying low,” Jack supplied, with typical charity.

Stephen nodded, feelings knotted in his chest like a snarl of rope left out to the sun and spray, beyond all hope of untangling. “Very low,” he said, his voice constricted. He let out a choked noise, scarcely fitting a human being, and hung his head. “Oh, Jack, please, forgive me—I should have searched—“

“Nonsense, Stephen, you would have been caught in an instant; you did not see how they turned the Continent upside-down looking for English agents. All the old Sophies and Surprises kept weather ears out, for we did not wish to give you up for dead, and reported back to me when they could. It was nearly four months before the general hunt died down.”

“Still, I most regret—“

“Cast it out of your mind, Stephen. You had every reason to think I had died.”

 _And you had every reason to think the same_ , Stephen thought, _and your material position was ever so much worse than mine, and yet still you searched for me, while I lost myself mourning for you_. “And the rest of your time has been spent as—as a sailor, for the French ships?”

“Yes, that is right. Mostly in the Caribbean, where they are slaughtering everyone who had anything to do with the uprising in Haiti, even though half their men are dying of yellow jack. Lucky for me I caught it as a mid, and they say it does not go after the same man twice. You are lucky to have caught me in Bayonne—I had only been back to a European port twice, before that. But how did you come to France?”

“Another errand. My discovery of you at the prize match was pure coincidence, joyful coincidence.”

“You mean the only reason you are aboard this ship is because you learned that I was on it?”

“Of course, my dear,” Stephen said, with great affection, “although Forfait thinks it was his idea to take me aboard. Oh, you should have seen his face when I confessed I was a traveling medical man who had lost all his worldly possessions to bandits in the mountains. It practically lit up with greed. Of course he tried to convince me that it was all for my own edification—that I should see the alligators. The ruse was most transparent.”

“It… it sounds a little like how we met,” said Jack, his voice conveying his embarrassment even though his face was quite invisible to Stephen.  

“Oh, they are not at all the same. _We_ nearly came to blows over some syncopated foot-tapping before ever a mention of financial difficulties or career opportunities was bandied about. And Forfait does not have a musical bone in his body—is completely tone deaf, in fact. I have caught him humming; it is not a sound for civilized ears.”

Jack chuckled. "I maintain that it was not syncopated. I was keeping the measure perfectly." Then abruptly his hand grasped Stephen’s; he said, “Do you think we might try a duet?”

It was Stephen’s turn to chuckle. “My hypocrisy in criticizing the captain’s musical abilities will soon be revealed. You must recall, Jack, that though I can bring a cello to an A with no reference, I cannot induce my vocal cords to sound likewise in tune.”

“Pish tosh, Stephen. The Boccherini?”

It would have been a devilish difficult tune to hum even for good singers. Jack had a fine baritone, but this was not well-suited to a violin part, and Stephen’s voice could be kindly described as a croak. Presently they broke off, laughing quietly, and Jack, spasm loosened at last, drifted swiftly back to sleep.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You thought I was DEAD, didn't you? Well, I'm not. School's been kicking six kinds of stuffing out of me, but I'm still alive and still writing.

Jack slept the rest of the night through, for once not snoring, although this, Stephen knew, was more due to his supine position than any improvement in his sinuses. The sun rose, the watch changed, and all hands were piped to breakfast, and still Jack slumbered, his neck flushed pink, his breaths coming deep and even. Stephen knew from long experience, both with the sick and slumbering in general and with Jack in particular, that Jack would wake if he laid a hand on his forehead, to get a better sense of his temperature, and so for the time being he forewent his measurement and let the man sleep.

Stephen laid claim to some of the gunroom’s coffee and bacon, pausing for a moment to eavesdrop on their conversation. He returned to the sickroom, leafing through one of the books the previous surgeon had left behind—not voluntarily, of course, for he had died of the yellow jack. The book was an account by a Dane, Johan Christus Fabricius, of the insects to be encountered upon the island of St. Helena, a tiny speck of an island in the South Atlantic, one of the remotest known in that ocean or any other. For the most part the insects he had encountered were of the usual sort one found on these sorts of islands, but then Stephen ran across a measurement which made him stare: an earwig, allegedly three and a third inches long including its considerable foreceps. Fabricius had found several specimens in the great stands of _Commidendrum_ , or gumwood, that ranged across the island and nowhere else in the world, but, alas, all his attempts to preserve them had been for naught when his specimen-jars smashed in a prodigious storm on their return journey.

A sniffing noise from the patient brought a smile to Stephen’s face, so subtle as to be invisible to any but those who knew him well. After a moment, his patience was rewarded: Jack propped his chin up on his good arm and let out a plaintive, “Would that be bacon?”

“Yes, and you may eat it, too, for I have already had my portion.” Indeed he had: two rashers, shining with fat, more than enough to make his stomach feel as though it was bubbling with grease for the entire rest of the day; and he had allotted himself about a third of the coffee, and that little only because he knew Jack did not have a chance at coffee below deck, and had probably been dreaming of the stuff for months.

“Stephen, you are Heaven-sent, and make no mistake.”

“Do not be ridiculous, Jack; it was Mary who sent me, if anyone did, which I suppose is not to say Heaven more broadly construed did not figure into it. But here, have the bacon, before this grease congeals entirely, and do not blame me if you are struck down by apoplexy the next time you are making your way up the mouselines.”

“Oh, quiet. I have not had a good plate of apoplexy in a long time. You might as well let me enjoy this one without cadgering on, particularly as you are the one who brought it to me.”

“You speak justly, brother.” Stephen set plate and mug down on an end table, really a clever little tray that could be folded away in an instant. He turned to Jack and helped him to sit up, moving gingerly so as not to tear any of yesterday’s wounds open. Even through the bandages his fingers could feel the heat, and Jack’s colour was very high, rosy pink across his cheeks and his chest, red at the tip of his intact ear. “I fear you are with fever.”

“I suppose so, especially seeing as I slept until just after five bells in the forenoon,” Jack agreed, looking remarkably untroubled for all that, “but it ain’t much of one, so far as I can tell, and we did keep up rather late last night. Certainly it don’t affect my appetite.”

Stephen nodded, for they had indeed spoken until three bells into the mid watch, but he did not share Jack’s carefree attitude regarding the fever. During all his time as a doctor in the Royal Navy, he had treated precious few flogging cases, and never for so many as fifty lashes; he had always sailed with Jack, and Jack, for all his fire, had never been a flogging captain. A happy crew and a trim ship: these were what made Jack happy. Stephen had never been deceived on the goodness of human nature, particularly the nature of those men who habitually held positions of authority; but nevertheless, it was unsettling to serve on a truly unhappy ship. Something about the very way the pressed men held themselves seemed to cringe.

“Jack,” he said suddenly, “do you believe the men will mutiny?”

A whole rasher of bacon vanished into Jack’s mouth like a seal into the mouth of a great white shark; Jack chewed it, swallowed, and dabbed his mouth delicately on Stephen’s proffered handkerchief before replying, “It has been tried, Stephen, on other ships. Never once has it ended well for the men. The moment there is a sign of trouble the suspected ringleaders and all their friends and associates are put to death instantly. That is why you have not seen the cannonballs rolling about, below deck: it is now a hanging offense, and they do not particularly care who they hang for it so long as the rest of the crew understands their point.”

“Surely they must run through men at an astonishing pace.”

“Oh, to be sure they do. But they would rather do that than lose one ship, for as soon as they do, we will all be emboldened. And besides, the principal disadvantage of our side right now is that it cannot build ships fast enough or well enough, for the dockyards in Canada are not yet up to England’s old quality, for all that they have worked to improve the one in Halifax. A ship of the line like this one could make an enormous difference in the North Atlantic.”

“Why, Jack, you are speaking like you have just read the _Gazette_! Where did you get this information, my dear? What is your source?”

Jack shrugged, then winced as it pulled at the wounds in his back. “Oh, ship’s gossip, I suppose. You know sailors—clucking like hens in a blanket. And do not give me that look. Yes, the notion has occurred to me. I cannot say that I have not kept a weather ear out, where opportunity presented itself. We have men aboard on this ship who were aboard other ships even unhappier than this one.”

“I would not think that possible.”

“Oh, you would not believe how grim it can get below deck, Stephen. But perhaps I should not say ‘unhappier.’ Perhaps what I meant is that they were more expressive of their unhappiness than we have been aboard the _Fraternite_ so far. They took it to a point that quite alarmed their captains—who are very easily alarmed, for they know as well as we do that the weight of numbers is on our side—and half of them were hanged as a—as a damned precaution!”

Stephen frowned, almost surprised at the jolt of fury that struck him. He had seen the worst mankind had to offer—had seen Paris during the Terror, had seen the wreck of Edward Fitzgerald. Why, then, was he so affected now? Perhaps it was the sight of Jack—Jack who could barely believe such injustice was possible.

With difficultly, he dragged himself back to their conversation. “Why do you think that is? I mean, that the _Fraternite_ has not yet, er, alarmed young Master Forfait?”

“Oh, a number of reasons, I suppose. We have no firebrand among us; that is a very big help. And we have been in the Caribbean or in the crowded shipping lanes such as this one; they are always double thick with French ships. Even if we did manage to take ourselves, the others would band together and take us back in an instant. We all know that, and it discourages any drastic maneuvers.” Jack sighed. “I am ashamed to say the third factor is that the lad has made it freely known that informants will be generously rewarded. I know they exist; I do not know who they are. We cannot make plans in earshot of any, or we will certainly all be lost. And so even below deck we must be the souls of discretion, and I must instantly talk down any man who is getting too overtly resentful, or see him hanged. In the tops it is much easier to have a free conversation. But the upshot of this is that Forfait believes that I am a calming influence upon his ship, and so even though the men look up to me and he does not like that, he allows me to live because he can use it to his advantage. That is why even when he is utterly displeased with me he will still do nothing worse than set me in a fight against some big bully at the docks. This is the first time he has had me flogged, and I have been on his ship for four months now.”

“Regarding your informants—I know two already,” Stephen said at once, with a vicious frown. “They came to the captain’s cabin with their hands out after I was commissioned, my first day aboard. One, a tall man, with curling middle-brown hair and a scar through his lip, the other my height, with green eyes and barely a tooth to speak of.”

“MacDougal and Puck,” Jack said. “Lord, I would never have thought to suspect either of them.”

“I imagine I shall uncover more in due time,” Stephen said. “It might do to fabricate something intriguing—not criminal, mind, nor liable to provoke retribution—but something of interest to the captain, that may be heard by our worms, such that they will all go crawling to their master, and I may observe.”

“But how shall you tell me?” Jack asked. “When I am recovered, I cannot very well come to you for information. For us, a visit to the doctor requires permission from a lieutenant or above.”

“We shall arrange a dead drop in a suitable knothole; I shall explain to you how one works.”

“I know how knotholes work, Stephen," said Jack primly. "And what sort of thing might intrigue him?”

Stephen pondered it for a moment before saying, with a sly grin, “Perhaps you might let it be known how eager the lower decks are to avenge yourselves on the wretched colonials at last.”

“Oh, we are fighting the Americans now?” Jack yawned.

“You knew already?” Stephen cried, crestfallen that his gem of intelligence, procured only that morning over eggs in the gunroom, had been so easily anticipated.

“They want Louisiana and Boney wants the whole damn world; it was only a matter of time. I have heard some truly outrageous claims regarding the strength of their frigates; but they have only tested themselves against the Barbary corsairs. They have never had combat with a civilized nation.”

“Then their moment will come soon, assuming you count us among the civilized,” Stephen says. “We are to touch in Saint-Domingue and then join the blockade of Boston.”

Jack turned the words over a moment before replying. “You said we were to join the blockade. Does this mean we will not be traveling in convoy, on the way there?”

“We will not, dear Jack,” said Stephen. “We shall be playing catch-up, seeing as the main fleet has already departed from the Caribbean.”

“Alone at sea,” Jack said, and grinned like a shark.

* * *

A series of furious storms broke upon them beginning the very next day, and there was so much south in their westing Stephen wondered if he might by chance behold Brazil again. But abruptly the winds turned in their favor; the sun broke out, and they began making truly spectacular time for a man-of-war. The _Fraternite_ was well-built, as was the case with many French ships, and furthermore her crew was so well seasoned at this point it was a wonder the officers bothered to come on deck at all. She clipped along with a great tearing wake and dolphins leaping along at her side. Jack returned to the lower decks, his fever resolved, lashes scarring over. Two weeks after that, some eighty miles off the Carolina coast, came the cry of sail.

“I do believe that is a frigate, Killick” said Jack from the crosstrees, shielding his eyes from the sun with one broad palm.

“Pah. My eyes ain’t what they used to be,” replied Killick, from some twenty feet above. But then, second later, “Which it’s a frigate all right, a big heavy ‘un. A Yankee, d’ye think?”

“It very well could be,” Jack said, not wishing to tempt fate even though his heart had leaped in his chest at the very first sight of her. The ships were steering almost at right angles to one another, and from this height, he could make out her fine press of sail and shapely lines very well. Yet there was no doubting her size; she was not as big as the _Fraternite_ , a sixty-four, but she was a good sight bulkier than the average British frigate, if indeed such a thing had ever existed. If she was American—if it came to a fight—if they were called to board her—he had every confidence Stephen would realize the moment was at hand, but there would be no time to get word to him. He would simply trust in his friend, as he had so often done.

When the orders to prepare for battle finally came, they were half-executed before they could even be stated completely. Jack went flying down to the deck, for he was captain of the starboard forward gun crew. Thus far in the few little piddling actions he had been in as a French (his mind darted around the word _slave_ ) pressed man he had made no effort at all to fire at the top of the roll, to use any kind of sights, even to aim in the general direction of the ship they fought. This would be different: if the  _Fraternite_ did not board the enemy, the plan would be suicidal rather than simply audacious.

“It’s the _Philadelphia_ ,” Bonden whispered from the corner of his mouth as he hurried to his own gun; Jack’s pulse quickened another notch. “Forty-four guns.”

His mind turned to the _Philadelphia_. She was nearly new-built, niece to _Constitution, Constellation,_ and _Chesapeake_ and sister to _Fortitude_ and _Freedom_. Talk belowdeck had been of little else than the American Navy since their destination had been known, but precious little was known of these heavy frigates. She handled well, and as soon as she sighted the _Fraternite_ she turned as if to run back to the coast, a conservative move, and probably the wise one. Yet Jack nearly cried out to see her fly away, because if they should miss their chance at her, they might never see another like it. Certainly not surrounded by the Boston blockade.

The _Fraternite_ had the weather gauge, and they piled on every scrap of sail they could afford. Jack could see his fellow pressed men working equally fervently; they all knew this was the only moment. _Philadelphia_ ’s mainsails flopped disconsolately, robbed of some of their breeze, and she lost a good deal of distance tacking as she turned back towards the shore. Besides that, the seas were choppy and contrary, and this favored the larger ship. A small spark of hope kindled in Jack’s chest. If they could just close with the _Philadelphia_ before she reached the shelter of the coastal batteries that had undoubtedly been installed…

Within two hours they were within the range of _Philadephia_ ’s stern guns, but their quarry was also within range of their forward chasers. Forfait had heard of Jack’s skills in aiming cannon from his predecessor—for Jack had not been able to resist attempting showing up the French gun crews when they practiced, and the captain, in his eagerness to be rid of a former equal, had magnified his virtue to the naïve young Forfait twice over. So it was that Jack found himself standing over the forward chaser, spluttering slowmatch in hand and the fleeing frigate before him.

He aimed with great deliberation. The wind, the particularities of the cold brass gun, the pitch and roll; he held each in his mind, not daring to so much as breathe.

“Good Lord, get on with it,” the lad drawled, and it took all Jack’s strength to hold back an insolent glare. Four seconds later he was ready; the chaser went with a mighty bellow, rocking back like a startled horse, and the ball skimmed out over the waves. Seconds later; a mighty crash, audible even over the smack of the waves, and the frigate’s mizzen sagged, sagged, and at last splintered and fell to the deck. A great grin broke out on Jack’s face, and he glanced over at Forfait to see the lad’s nearly identical expression.

“There will be rum for you tonight, Aubrey, if you live out the day,” said Forfait, patting him on the shoulder.

“ _Merci_ , sir,” Jack managed to say, thinking, _I will take the best wine in your damn stores and drink it in front of you, if you live out the day._ The thud of axes and nasal shouts could be heard from the _Philadelphia_ , but the frigate's momentum was lost, and the _Fraternite_ more than halved the distance between them in the time it took to free the mizzen from the deck. Jack hazarded a glance at Bonden, manning the starboard chaser fifteen feet to his right. The man’s lips were compressed into a thin line, but otherwise his expression gave no sign of what was to come.

“Pardon me, Captain.” Jack nearly startled; it was Stephen’s voice, close at hand. “First Lieutenant Rincon sends his most effusive apologies, but he says there is an urgent matter to do with the powder and that your presence is needed immediately.”

“The—the powder—good God, man, can he not see we are to engage any moment?”

Stephen wrung his hands, the picture of an indecisive subordinate. “Sir, he begs me to inform you that—“ He leaned in close, whispering in Forfait’s ear. Jack schooled his features into a carefully neutral expression; he knew what Stephen was telling Forfait, because he had instructed the words himself: _the powder has gone to damp, it is all ruined_. Naturally, Forfait would have to confirm the disaster himself, and urgently, for _Fraternite_ could not capture _Philadelphia_ without usable powder; would even be in danger of capture herself.

Forfait’s face went the color of weak gruel. He followed Stephen below deck.

The _Fraternite_ continued to gain inexorably on the _Philadelphia_ , but the captain did not reappear. Stephen did, though, catching Rincon as he emerged from the head and likewise diverting him belowdecks.

A moment after Stephen and Rincon vanished from sight the captain of the Marines, a known gambler and duellist, came to ask Jack where the man had gone.

Jack shrugged, heart pounding in his throat. He could not give away Stephen’s location; if the captain of the Marines stumbled upon their plot, all was lost. The man commanded thirty more, all armed to the teeth; it was critical the Marines be otherwise occupied boarding the _Philadelphia_ before the mutineers made their move. “Something’s amiss,” Jack shrugged, at last.

“They went that way,” said a midshipman, pointing, and Jack ground his teeth. Bonden shot him a questioning glance; fifteen feet of open space never seemed so far. _I must follow him_ , Jack attempted to communicate, by dint of his eyebrows and short jerking movements of his head. _I need a diversion_. He shook his hands in wild disarray for a half-second, hoping the point was clear.

Bonden narrowed his eyes, then nodded. A moment later he gave a subtle nudge to Joe Plaice, his companion on the gun crew, before shouting, “Hey, you damn Yankees! We’ll catch you lot and string you up!”

Joe Plaice joined in; very soon, the jeering and whistling were being flung back upon their heads by the Americans who were, it seemed, both incensed and confused to be taunted in their own language by an ostensibly French ship.

The second lieutenant, a green boy and now the senior officer on deck, did not know quite how to comport himself in the face of such chaos. He was baffled at the enthusiasm of the pressed men for battle; would have been baffled, too, at how the sails adjusted themselves perfectly without any orders from him, as though the _Fraternite_ herself were eager for blood. Jack glanced up to the tops, met eyes with Babbington in the crosstrees, and grinned. Then, while the officers’ attention was trained on the American’s increasingly lurid counter-taunts, Jack slipped below deck, praying he would find Stephen before the captain of the Marines did.

* * *

A sharp blow to the back of the head with a belaying-pin, and Rincon crumpled, landing with his face in the barrel of powder he had just pronounced perfectly serviceable. Stephen had gripped the lieutenant under his arms and was in the midst dragging him towards his like-wise unconscious captain, when a shadow fell across the room and a voice from the doorway said, “Well, now, what have we here?”

Stephen dropped Rincon and dove behind another powder barrel, extinguishing the lamp he carried as he did so. In the half-light he caught the glint of a pistol being drawn, and charged towards it more out of wild instinct than any real strategy. His quick action was rewarded; the captain of the Marines, though taller than Stephen, was bowled over without getting off a shot.

A vicious struggle ensued: Stephen’s driving shoulder to the chest had knocked the wind from the Marine’s lungs, but the man was deadly experienced in hand-to-hand combat. He raked Stephen’s face with one hand and got half a grip on the pistol with the other before Stephen smashed the hand to the deck, once, twice. The pistol clattered another arm’s length away, and the Marine, squirming and bucking mightily, managed to throw Stephen’s weight off his body. He leaped to his feet—Stephen dove onto his back—he slammed Stephen hard into the bulwark with all his weight. Stephen staggered, stunned.

The Marine scooped up the pistol and whirled around. Stephen’s eyes squeezed shut of their own accord, and his mind in an instant flashed out three thoughts: _they will be free_ and _I shall never see them again_ and _Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —

The sound of the gunshot was so loud in the enclosed space that it sent every one of his senses reeling, and it was to his considerable surprise that the first thing he perceived, upon their return, was a strong hand squeezing his arm far too tight, and Jack Aubrey’s voice saying hoarsely, “—send to God that you are not badly hurt, please, Stephen, will you only say something?”

Stephen opened his eyes. Jack’s other hand was searching along Stephen’s neck and upper chest for wounds. He was dreadfully pale, his fingers shaking.

Stephen blinked once, twice. Jack seemed ill, indefinably off. “Are _you_ hurt, Jack?”

“No, he was quite distracted with you. I must get back abovedeck before I am missed.” Jack held a pistol in his hands. The stock was quite bloody; he wiped it off on the Marine’s trousers, which were the only part of him not also bloody. “But I shall keep this. We will need you in the orlop soon, Stephen.”

“I am the only man on our side who can carry a weapon without suspicion,” Stephen said. “We agreed before that I should fight.”

“Stephen, you are already hurt,” Jack said, raising a hand to Stephen’s head. Stephen’s hand followed, came away bloody.

“It is a graze from the bulwark, that is all. A trifling scrape that should in no way prevent me from fighting,” Stephen said.

“The ship’s doctor, wandering about on deck before a boarding action with a great bloody scrape on his head? It will quite give the pony away, dear Stephen.”

Stephen opened his mouth to retort, but no answer occurred to him. “… the orlop,” he finally said, and Jack squeezed his arm one last time before scrambling back abovedeck.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who has a degree now!? *sleeps for 278 days*
> 
> Seriously, readers, thank you so much for sticking with me through all this. I told you I wouldn't stop until you saw the words "THE END" and I've kept my word... albeit very, very slowly. Your comments, your encouragement, your art (!)-- they've meant so much to me, and you gave me the push I needed to get through. So, I'll say it again: thank you. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

Jack ducked the whirling sabre-cut and pistoled the boarder neatly, roaring out, “Cut the grappling lines and shove off! Babbington—for God's sake, luff up! Now!” Another man swarmed up to take the first’s place, and Jack deflected another desperate stroke with the barrel of the pistol in a great shriek of metal on metal. Jack stepped in close to smash the man’s nose with the stock. He dropped like a stone, and Jack seized the sword as it fell from his nerveless hands. Only a dozen feet away, aboard the _Philadelphia_ , he thought he heard the phrase _make_ _ready for boarding_. “Babbington!” he cried again, in utmost frustration.

He raced to the railing, chopping down with frenzied strength at the grappling lines. Some fifteen Americans had made it aboard the _Fraternite_ after her Marines had boarded the _Philadelphia_ , and now chaos reigned on two decks, the powder-smoke making it difficult to determine the course of the battle.

“That’s all the lines done, sir!” Bonden appeared out of the smoke, his face blackened with powder except for a thin line of blood running down from his hairline. “We’re free.”

 _Free_. Jack’s heart raced in exhilaration, and just like that the timbers gave a groan, the sails shifted, and the _Fraternite_ began to heel subtly. The distance between the ships widened, and then lengthened as the _Fraternite_ steered further into the wind, allowing the wind to spill from her flapping sails even as the _Philadelphia_ ’s momentum carried her farther ahead. From the deck of the American deck came a mixture of triumphant cheers and cries of shock and woe; the French Marines, by far the most dangerous party to the mutineers aboard the _Fraternite_ , were now abandoned and unsupported on the deck of the American ship. In a matter of moments the last few of the Americans aboard the _Fraternite_ were subdued, raising their hands above their heads when they realized the hopelessness of their situation, outnumbered twenty-to-one without any hope of rifle support from their own ship. It had gone much the same with the poor second lieutenant and the smattering of midshipmen, for which Jack was heartily glad; he did not like to make it his business to slaughter young boys.

“Do you think they’ll surrender?” Bonden inquired, nodding towards the chaos aboard the _Philadelphia_. The ships were now separated by around twenty yards, lengthening every second, and though Jack could hear screams, he could make out very little of what was occurring on the ostensibly enemy ship. He frowned, squinting into the smoke. “I don’t know,” he said. “If only I had a glass…”

Scarcely a moment had passed before one was shoved into his hands. “Why, thankee,” Jack said, raising it to his eye and beginning to survey the situation aboard the _Philadelphia._

Abruptly something was stuffed onto Jack’s head, and he looked away from his glass in time to see Killick skulking away, muttering, “ain’t even got a bleeding hat, what does ‘e think ‘e’s about?” Jack lifted the offending object from his head and realized it was Forfait’s own bicorne, the little _tricolor_ that had previously adorned it having been violently removed. He put it back on at his own preferred angle and continued his survey uninterrupted, pausing only to order the raising of the Union Jack.

The French marines were formidable opponents, and they must have realized, from the sudden absence of their ship, that they had no avenue for retreat. But numbers—and the advantage of riflemen in the tops—began to show, and Jack could not stifle his grimace as he witnessed them be slaughtered. The Americans took heavy casualties, with even their captain bleeding from a slash high on his leg before the few Marines left standing laid down their arms.

 _We could take them_. The thought came to Jack unbidden, but there it was. The _Fraternite_ maintained the weather gauge, and had the clear advantage in size and in weight of gunmetal. The _Fraternite_ , it was true, lacked Marines and most officers, but their numbers were almost even, especially now that many Americans had taken wounds. The _Philadelphia_ had lost her mizzen; and while he had been belowdeck aiding Stephen they had scored another hit along her side, but she was in no danger of sinking. If he handled her gently—a heavy war frigate, and exceedingly well-build, fast for her weight—she would make a jewel of a prize.

He glanced up at the Union Jack, snapping proudly above. His heart pounded hot in his chest, ready to move, ready for blood…

From his potential prize came the hacking of innumerable axes, and a moment later the great splash of the fallen mast being shoved off into the water. The captain realized his position of great peril; was hobbling about the deck with his face pale, gesturing forcefully. Jack might chase her, and might even very well catch her. But he could not very well man her, given his near-critical shortage of men for the _Fraternite_. What’s more, any attack, successful or no, would certainly not do to improve the already extremely strained relations between his nation and the _Philadelphia_ ’s. So, though the men howled taunts after the other ship, Jack merely gave a philosophical sigh and collapsed his glass. His left shoulder twinged as he made the motion, and he gave it a stern look, and it was only then that he saw the blood running down his arm.

***

 “You would not believe me to say it, Stephen, but I thought of politics, and the situation as it was on land, and I neglected not to pursue our prize on that basis.”

“Most diplomatic of you, my dear,” Stephen said tonelessly, rooting around in the muscle of Jack’s shoulder with his forceps. Jack could feel the curious motion of the instrument; could even, he fancied, feel some of the cold of the metal, but the overwhelming sting of the alcoholic spirits that Stephen had soaked the wound in, the remainder of the blood-fury of battle, and the strange woolen blanket of the alcoholic tincture of laudanum which he had been administered, combined to render him nearly insensible to the pain.

Nevertheless, it felt very strange as Stephen drew out the ball; ugly, somewhat flattened, and rather small considering all the trouble it was capable of causing.

“Is that done with, then? Not that I do not enjoy your company, Stephen, but I must be back on deck. Without Babbington there is not a single man aboard capable of making a lunar, and I must get a fix on our position. Jupiter—“

“Jupiter be damned and hold ye still, Jack Aubrey, or I shall have Davis sit on you.” This delivered in a curious croak. “There is a piece of cloth here, and I must have it out, or very soon we shall all be kissing you goodbye before you even see Sophie again, you great hardheaded contrarian lunk.”

Jack’s heart leaped at the thought of Sophie; he had hardly allowed himself to think upon her as a person he might see again, these past years, for all it did was burn his heart to know that they were both alive, and yet might never see one another again. Still, he had loved very much to think upon her and the children, but as abstract characters: as a cast of four, living idyllically in a cottage in a perfect England, in the house he had built for them in his mind. And so he answered this startling rebuke with a mild, “Davis would never,” and kept himself very still until the doctor’s forceps drew out not only a scrap of his own shirt, but also a monstrous piece of sailcloth.  A damned near random shot from the tops, if it had passed through the sail above his head. But he did not mention this to Stephen, whose savageness of mood increased in direct proportion to reminders that Jack might have been killed, and, as Stephen was still probing deep within his arm for any last scraps or other possible sources of infection, Jack decided that this was not the time to provoke him.

At last Stephen cauterized the wound, clapped a bandage over the arm, pronounced him ready to be released, and condemned him to his lunar. Jack declared that he intended to remain below for a little while longer, despite Stephen’s snappishness, to see how Babbington fared. The doctor’s face softened and he led Jack at once to the lad’s cot.

“Oh, do not wake him on my account, I beg you,” Jack began, as Stephen went to shake the patient’s shoulder.

Stephen glared daggers at him. “It is not on your account that I am waking him. Skull injuries are very dangerous—there must be direct monitoring of the patient’s cognition every hour, for at any moment they might take a turn for the worse, and require intervention.”

At length—an anxious length, for Jack—Babbington’s eyes came open. He recognized the doctor, recognized Jack. The date was… was it September? No, no, it was October, early October—his birthday would be soon. Would the doctor mind terribly dousing the lantern? He did not mean to complain, but he had a cracking pain in his head.

Stephen obliged at once, shoving the lantern behind Jack’s bulk, so that Babbington’s sensitive eyes were shielded from the worst of it. He continued his questioning, all the severity he had possessed mere moments before evaporating at once, for he was quite fond of Babbington, and had grown to know him well over years of treating the various poxes he acquired in every port he came to. Could Babbington state the name of their ship? Could he remember the cox’n’s name? Was his neck at all sore and stiff? The answers to all three of these questions was yes. At the doctor’s palpation of his right temple Babbington gave a flinch, and his eyes fell on Jack, color coming to his cheeks.

Stephen turned and glared more daggers. “Do not mind the captain,” he said, “he is here purely out of concern for your welfare, and has suffered a little in the same way himself aboard the _Leopard_. He knows a little of what it means to have a concussion, although I dare say he has never yet managed to hairline fracture his skull. I would not put it past him at some future date, however.”

Babbington gave a faint smile at this, showing his few remaining teeth. Would… would the doctor have to saw open his skull and rouse out his brains? Not that he minded, particularly, as long as it was the doctor doing it—he had all the confidence in the world that the doctor would quite set them to rights, but…but it was best to be prepared for such things as having one’s brains roused out.

Stephen gave a faint internal frown, for this was the fourth time Babbington had asked this question. “I do not think so,” he said, with a quality that might almost have been called gentleness, “but I will not deceive you that a small possibility remains. Now, could you tell me the cox’n’s name?”

“Barrett Bonden,” Babbington replied, without a hint of indignation at having been asked a second time. His eyelids opened and closed, the motion slower than Stephen would have liked, but at least his pupils were the same size on both sides. Behind Stephen, Jack shifted uneasily.

“You have done very well, Mr. Babbington. Pray go to sleep, and I shall wake you again in an hour.”

Babbington’s whole form relaxed subtly, his breathing evening out: instantly asleep. In a man who had not spent most of his life at sea Stephen would have found this alarming, but it was the usual in Jack and indeed nearly all of the seafaring men he had treated. Stephen checked his forehead for a temperature, but there was none. That, at least, was good news.

There was nothing more for him to do, for Babbington and Jack were the ship’s only treatable casualties from the battle with the _Philadelphia_. Three men had been killed outright, victims of the sharpshooters, and one more had bled out under Stephen’s knife not two minutes after receiving his wound, a dreadful shot that had entered near the collarbone and passed through the lung, stopping somewhere near the kidney. The corpse (Peter Newcombe, able seaman) was still present; he would be delivered to the sea in a ceremony tomorrow morning.

“How did it happen?” Jack asked, his voice very soft, even though they had been conversing at normal volume before, and nothing short of the trumpets of Judgment Day would wake Peter Newcombe now.

“My dear, I am not entirely sure, for I do not understand how the rigging is… it is a complicated affair. But there are some pretty heavy blocks up there, and evidently a bullet parted an unlucky rope, and it was sent flying into Babbington’s head, quite stunning him.”

“It was a miracle he did not fall,” Jack observed.

“Indeed. My understanding is that he fell across a… a scoone—“

“Boom, dear Stephen.”

“—a broom, and that one of the other men, observing the blow, was able to... to shimmy up and catch hold of his trousers before he was lost entirely. Very quickly one of the other men noticed their distress and helped them to the mast proper, and they carried him down and brought him to me with admirable haste.”

“I shall have those men’s names,” Jack vowed. “They have saved me an admirable lieutenant. And of course, so have you, Stephen, but I do not presume you are much in the way of desiring an extra ration of grog.”  

“You think right, my dear,” Stephen said. Tending Babbington’s poor aching head had evidently drawn the teeth of his savage mood. He went out on deck with Jack, smoking one of their former captain's excellent cigars placidly as Jack made his observations. They were some ten degrees east of the South Carolina coast, to go by Jack’s very best guess, but the French did not have at all the best chronometers aboard, damn them, and what’s more, one of them had managed to toss the ship’s log overboard in the confusion of the mutiny, meaning that they could not rely upon anything like dead reckoning. In any case, no matter where they were as far as their longitude went, their only course could be north into Halifax to resupply, and if it looked like they were about to ram Cape Cod, well, then they would necessarily have to make that a little east of north.

The weather turned very rapidly colder as they progressed north, but their wind held firm, and the sea rolled by under them, their wake a long white streamer. They sighted three other ships in total, two American merchantmen that fled when they caught sight of the tricolor, and one French sloop, whom they promptly captured. Excepting these few encounters, they made their way undisturbed, the latitude steadily increasing.  

With the wind so fair Jack had very little to do with himself most days, and he took to schooling the boys he had deemed midshipmen. As it transpired, only one of the six could read, and so in the end he let them play catch-up with Barrett Bonden, who had a good deal more patience with such things than he, and conducted his navigational efforts alone. Alone, for Babbington was still below with his cracking headache and great sensitivity to light, though Stephen assured Jack that the immediate danger to his life was past. Jack remembered very well the feelings of general haze and disorientation that came with a concussion, and left the stricken lieutenant to his eighteen or so hours of sleep a day, which Stephen promised would sooner or later set all to rights. By the time they reached Nova Scotian waters Babbington was well enough to stand watch, with all the hands smiling and inquiring after his head, and even well enough, by Stephen’s judgment, to share a glass of wine with Jack in celebration of his return to good health.

Then, coming into Halifax, very like a dream; the startled hails and delighted laughter at the dockyards; no formal report to make, for they were under no orders—Jack pleading with a shocked Heneage Dundas, at anchor in the _Euryalus_ , to show him where Sophie lived now; tearing through the town, a blur of buildings, not even noticing Stephen jogging along in their wake until they were practically at the front door; and then Jack paused, hand up and poised to knock, in agony, sheer agony. What if she had moved on? What if she had taken another?

Jack startled at Stephen’s gentle touch at his elbow. “Jack, perhaps I might…” he said, and hauling in a deep, shuddering breath Jack stepped back several paces, and let Stephen take the lead.

In a moment the door swung open, and there stood Sophie in a black dress, a dishrag in one hand and a dark smudge across her forehead. She drew back with a sharp intake of breath, clutching the dishrag violently.

“Sophie, I—“ Stephen began, before she flung her arms around him.

“Oh, Stephen, I am so very glad to see you and I am so very, very sorry,” Sophie cried. Her face was pressed against Stephen’s shoulder, her eyes tight shut against an onslaught of tears.

“Dear child, what on earth do you have to be sorry about?” Stephen replied, in a tone of wonder.

“I should have insisted that you come to Halifax with us—I cannot believe what I was thinking, to let you stay in England—but the news you brought—Jack—I was beside myself, I wasn’t thinking clearly, oh, Stephen, I have been so worried for you—“

She drew back, still clutching at Stephen’s arms, and gazed upon his face. “You look… better,” she said at last.

“Well,” Stephen said, carefully stepping back and casting his face towards Jack, who had been standing well away, “I have had an old friend looking after me, one whom I had not expected.”

Sophie’s eyes fell upon Jack, and she went utterly still, her face blanching a shocking white. Stephen moved to support her, but there was no need—she flung herself into Jack’s arms, rocking him back a step with the force of it, one hand fisted in his threadbare shirt, the other with fingers in his short-cropped hair. She did not weep—was too surprised to weep—but Jack did, a little, silent tears dropping down his face into her golden hair. He breathed in deep. She smelled just as she had always smelled: like bread and a little of the fireplace, and of herself. They embraced for a long moment, and Stephen and Hen stepped well away, to allow them their privacy.

At last she let go of him, and he of her, though his arms were most reluctant to, and she took his face between her hands. “Jack,” she said, eyes shining, and then her voice failed her.

“—and those are most certainly great shearwaters, _Puffinus gravis_ , which may be distinguished from the sooty shearwaters, _griseus_ , in the other tree less by their size than by their lighter coloration—“

Stephen was speaking in a low murmur, and he and Hen had turned their backs, but it was still enough for Sophie to notice them and cry out, “Stephen! Hen! Oh, how rude I have been, I beg your pardon—“

“Not at all, Mrs. Aubrey,” Hen said gallantly, “In any case, I must return to my ship.”

He tipped his hat to Jack and was gone. Stephen made as if to follow him, but Sophie ran out and caught the edge of his sleeve wordlessly.

“Stephen, I—“

“Please forgive me, Sophie,” he said, incapable of meeting her eyes. “I cannot imagine the pain I inflicted upon you when I thought—when I said…I should leave you to get reacquainted,” Stephen turned to leave. “I should go find a room for myself.”

“It was clear that you felt such anguish yourself,” Sophie said, not letting go of his sleeve, and at last he looked up into her eyes and found something in them both firm and kind. “Please, do not feel the need to apologize; you got us to Halifax when it seemed impossible. It meant something to me, then, that Jack still—that you… remained, and now you have returned him to me.” Jack had approached as she spoke, and he clapped one great hand wordlessly to Stephen’s shoulder. Sophie threaded a hand round his other arm, as though to convince herself that he was still there. “In any case, you cannot possibly think of renting a room for yourself; you belong with us. Now please, won’t you come in?”

Stephen hesitated, shocked that such a thing was possible; that there could be place for him in a little house in a little town that was, for the moment, far from the war. Jack gripped his shoulder reassuringly, and Sophie clasped his hand in hers, closing the circle. “I will, thank you,” he said, scarce believing it, and allowed himself to be led inside.

 

 

 

 

THE END.


End file.
